 Zoom fatigue is very real, especially if you're not used to being on video calls all day long, the way that folks at all remote companies are. You can think of one of the ways to fight Zoom fatigue is to one, you know, figure out before you set up a meeting, hey, do you need that meeting at all? You know, is this something you could probably hash out through Slack, through email, just asynchronously? Maybe you can start a thread to get some of the preamble going and some context sharing and then you can do a Zoom call later on down the line to reach the decision or to make sure that everybody has a voice there. Hello and welcome to Universal Remote, a weekly webcast from GitLab where we talk about all things remote. I'm Darren, Head of Remote at GitLab, the world's largest all remote organization and on this show we tackle the hard questions. We ask about the real challenges and we invite really interesting people to come and join us and give tips and tricks on being the best you can be at remote. And this week I'm thrilled to be joined by Steph, the Head of Communications at Zapier. So Steph, thank you so much for joining me. Give the audience an overview of what you do at Zapier and how long you've been working remotely. Hey Darren, thanks, glad to be on the show. So I am the Head of Communications at Zapier. My team does press and media relations. We do Zapier social media and we also run the Zapier blog. I've been at Zapier for two years, which also means I've been remote for the last two years as well. So Zapier is all remote as well, right? Yep. So we have around 300 people and we're spread out across 30 different countries and we've never had an office. No office. So to each his own, to each her own, your own office. So I think we have a lot in common. GitLab is all remote as well. So you weren't remote prior to Zapier, is that correct? Yeah, that's right. I was actually at an office in the Bay Area and so a lot of face-to-face time there learned how to be remote while at Zapier and kind of like get the way that GitLab is run. Zapier is really driven. They're very intentional about remote. So even as a part of the onboarding process, you learn about how Zapier communicates, how we use Slack, you know, all of that stuff and it's quite a big learning curve at first, especially coming from an office environment. And I can only imagine what people are going through right now finding themselves suddenly remote. Yeah, so the topic of today's show is actually assuming positive intent and I think we need to do a lot of that right now because a lot of people have been thrust into a remote situation and not only are they dealing with remote for the first time potentially but also having kids at home, dealing with global isolation, there's a lot going on. So I just wanted to start by asking what tips and tricks you had from your time at Zapier when it comes to communication and how do you do it? How does your team do it and what could others learn from that? Yeah, one of the things that you really have to learn when you move into a remote environment is know that you need to retrain your brain a little bit. Going into that theme of assuming positive intention, it's by no means a new or mind blowing concept for anybody yet it's the hardest to practice. To this day, I still struggle sometimes with practicing it. One of the ways that I remember to assume positive intentions is to write myself a post-it note. It's on my monitor right now. I have it there all the time. It's especially important when you're in a remote environment because you're not face-to-face with someone. You don't get to leave a meeting where you both disagreed on something and then go to lunch and laugh about it afterwards. You really kind of just move on with your day and so making sure that you're going into it and you're assuming that someone is just trying to help you or just trying to give you feedback or maybe they're just asking questions because they're curious is a really good place to start. I think that that's a really important thing that you should be leading your communications with when you're in a remote environment. Yeah, and it's especially true I've found when you're communicating through text. So it's one thing to have a Zoom call, have a video call. There's some amount of body language there and you can work through some of the miscommunications but especially when it's text, if it's over an email, if it's over Slack, especially if English might not be your first language or there's different cultural expectations and so on and so forth. It's really, really important to lean into that and it kind of brings me to my next question which is what challenges have you seen at Zapier in an all remote environment that some others may be experiencing right now but because they haven't lived remotely for very long they don't know how to articulate it. They might not know what they're experiencing. So shed some light on challenges that you've seen and what you do to work through those. One of the things that I see the most often is just really struggling with writing. As you mentioned, it's a really text-based way to communicate when you move to a remote environment. You're probably dealing with teammates who are not in the same time zone as you, so you need to be considerate about, hey, is what I've written specific enough? You know, when you're asking for something and you need it by end of day, is it end of day your time? Is it end of day the other person's time? You need to be really clear about those things so nobody's left wondering. If you have a teammate in a different country, a different time zone, and you really need them the way in, you need to allow that time to seep into, you know, how long it takes for you to make a decision and communicate that decision to everybody else. You also really need to get to the point pretty quickly. If you're in, if you're working in an environment like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and you have an ask for someone, you know, treat their time, treat the reader's time is really valuable, have the ask upfront, learn how to use threads in Slack, you know, just try to be as direct as possible when you're, when you really need something or you need somebody's feedback. That's something that you really don't have, you really don't practice quite as much when you're face to face because when you're face to face with someone, you probably have time for a preamble, you know, getting to know somebody and all of that stuff. But if you need something in a remote environment, you got to ask for it and you got to be upfront about it. And how does that play into communicating asynchronously or assuming that you need to provide context and have some grace when it comes to how long somebody might take to respond? Because when you have hundreds of people spread across the world, you can't exactly expect that someone is even awake or available or that they're not in a meeting or not in deep work or doing something with their family. Oh, 100%. One of the things that we do here when it's something like that is, like for example, I have a teammate who is based on the East Coast time zone. So I'll give her, I'll send her something and I will add in brackets before I ask, hey, this is for tomorrow or this is for Monday. And she can look, she's probably going to be checking her notifications, but she can at least look at it and know that she doesn't have to respond to me. Another thing that we also do to signal that to other people is we use, we borrowed this hashtag system from Dartmouth Shaw over at HubSpot. And so that's basically adding like, hey, hashtag FYI, hey, you know what? I just want you to read this. You don't have to respond. You don't have to respond with an emoji or anything like that. You can just read it when you get around to it. If I'm suggesting something to you, hey, you know what? I spent a little bit of time thinking about this. Take it or leave it. It's just a suggestion. If I'm recommending something to you, if you see something with hashtag recommend, it usually means, you know what? We've really thought about this. There's a significant reason why we're recommending this to you. I'd love it if you could weigh in whenever you're able to. And if you decide not to go with it, if you could tell me why, that'd be great. And then there's plea, which is really rarely used around Zapier, which is like, you know what? Just do it. Please, for the love of God, just do it. So we have that system as well to communicate like how strongly we're feeling about something that we're sending each other. I find that really fascinating because one of the things that I've picked up on is in a remote setting you feel more, you feel an added responsibility to respond to things that you might just let pass in an office. So to your point, being articulate about this is just an FYI. You don't even have to feel like you need to emoji react to this. I'm not going to take offense to it. But putting those guardrails around it and being articulate about it is really important because what I've seen is especially for people that are transitioning into a remote space, their default is going to be over communicate. You hear this all the time that over communication is really important in remote settings, which is true. But without any explanation of what that means, if you just take that to mean over communicate about everything, it's actually a good way to get on a path to burnout. And it leads to my next question, which is zoom fatigue is something that a lot of people are running into even in all remote teams right now. It just feels like video call usages up, synchronous meetings are up. The world is in a very different place and folks are kind of experiencing this exhaustion that they can't really put their finger on. So what does work life harmony and balance look like at Zapier? How do you deal with things like zoom fatigue? Are you transparent about it? Is there a hand that you can raise when you feel like you're you're experiencing something like that any tips and tricks for those who may be on the receiving end of it? Zoom fatigue is very real, especially if you're not used to being on video calls all day long, the way that folks at all remote companies are. So it does. I mean, I remember when I first started at Zapier, I felt some zoom fatigue as well. We have video on for all of our meetings. It's encouraged. You can think of one of the ways to fight zoom fatigue is to one, you know, figure out before you set up a meeting. Hey, do you need that meeting at all? You know, is this something you could probably hash out through Slack, through email, just asynchronously, maybe you can start a thread to get some of the preamble going and some contacts sharing. And then you can do a zoom call later on down the line to reach the decision or to make sure that everybody has a voice there. There are some folks who also prefer to communicate through writing, as we mentioned, and not and are probably a little less, you know, willing to share their actual thoughts on zoom call. So I would keep that in mind, like who's in the room and whether you need that meeting. Another thing that we usually encourage here as well as to cluster your meetings, try to put all your zoom meetings and maybe like a two, three hour block and then have some time where you're not on a zoom call. It's super important to do to have focus time every day and to just have time off camera as well. We use a tool here called clockwise that helps with that. So oh my gosh, yeah. It's so great because I never really schedule myself focus time and having it on my calendar because so clockwise for those who aren't familiar with it, it's a tool that we use that basically clusters your meetings together. It reschedules them based on the availability of both of the people in the meeting, and it gives you a set amount of focus time per day, whether you want it in the morning or the afternoon. It gives you that focus time. It blocks it on your calendar and it just makes you feel like you have permission to be meeting free for a little chunk of time and just do some work. It's wonderful. So my next question was going to be what's one thing that we could recommend to the audience right now to improve communication and I still want to give you the chance to answer that, but my answer to that is going to be take a serious look at clockwise if you're new to this. If you aren't careful, you can have meetings just run a buck and it just sort of takes over your day and the amount of meetings that are going to be tolerable to you, it's going to be different depending on the role that you have. If you're a creator, a designer, where you need massive chunks of white time in your calendar, you're going to want fewer meetings and more focus time. If you're an executive where most of what you're doing is just reviewing proposals that are created by other people, maybe that can look a little bit different, but the beautiful thing about clockwise is you get an end of the week recap. It tells you how many meetings you've had, how much focus time you've had and how much fragmented time you have. And I actually have a goal to get my meeting time down and focus time up and I work on that on a weekly basis. So I look at my end of the week recap and actually make a goal to improve that. So crazy as it may sound, working on structuring your meeting versus focus time ratio could be a goal. So I'll throw that back to you. One piece of final advice on improving communication and assuming positive intent. Yeah. One of the things that's I've found really helpful is to use your Friday afternoons before you head out for the weekend to rearrange next week schedule. So it's a really good time to look at your schedule and think, Hey, you know what, like I have a bunch of meetings on Monday. Let me just add a couple more and just have that be a meeting day. So Tuesday and Wednesday are really focus heavy. If you are somebody as Darren mentioned, who really needs a lot of focus time, it's much easier to have a whole day of focus time than to break it up into little chunks where you can focus for 30 minutes and you've got to move on to the next thing. I think that is, I think that's a really great way to make sure that your, your schedule for the next week is off to a great start. And then finally just practice a lot of self forgiveness. Things are a little bit crazy right now. If your schedule still needs some wrangling, start with just making one meeting better. Be okay with just making one meeting a little bit better than it was last week and then build off of that. I'm a big fan of some, I'm a big fan of breaking up a big project or a big task into like little chunks. So it feels a little bit more manageable. So that's a great way to, to also improve your schedule from there. Yeah, for sure. Get lab. We try to recommend iteration whenever possible, break things down. If something is so big that it's going to just be this massive taxing mental load on you, try to break it down, try to make it smaller, see what you can consolidate, see what doesn't have to be done. It helps make things, makes things a little bit less daunting. So one final thought before we go into the actual clothes, your home office looks pretty amazing. Do you want to give folks a tour around it or just a description of what it is? Maybe some advice on how to structure a home office. A lot of people are working from home for the first time and they may be hunched over a kitchen counter and they're thinking, there's no way I can do this forever. So any tips from folks that have done it for a while or appreciated? I'll give you an element of some elements of my office. As you can see, my spirit animal Biggie Smalls is in the background there. Of course. Have something that brings you joy in your office for sure. Also try to not have a whole lot of clutter. Another piece, another magical piece of equipment that every remote worker needs is a pair of noise canceling headphones. My husband is working from home as well. I feel like a lot of folks have their kids and spouses working from home. Those are really critical when you have that focus time. Yeah, what I've told people, especially for those that are in tiny one-bedroom apartments, they're not used to having to work from home with multiple people there is cancelling headphones and sort of a makeshift enclave where work happens and then life happens outside of it. Goes a long way to separating work and life, even if it's temporary, even if it's just a makeshift curtain, something to separate work and life is really big. 100%. And then you'll see I'm in this IKEA office chair. Recent investment, but definitely if you're working from home, just invest in a nice chair. You're going to be sitting in it a lot. Something with good back support is so important. I know I sound like a total old lady saying this, but it's absolutely true. No, the old adage of, look, you better invest in a good mattress. You spend a huge amount of your time asleep. Well, now that everyone's working from home, also invest in a good chair or an awesome standing desk because you're going to spend a huge amount of time doing that as well. And if you don't look after your health, no one else will. Yes, for sure. So I'm going to close with this. One is one good thing you've seen or heard this week or this month. Okay. If there are any comms folks or marketing folks listening to this, there is an amazing Instagram video on Katy Perry's Instagram called Being Banana Breads Publicist because who is having a better quarantine right now than banana bread? They're blowing up. Highly recommend watching that if you need to smile today. Amazing. We're going to link that in the show notes. Steph, thank you so much for joining me for the audience. We'll be sure to link all of the things we talked about down in the description below. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and find more episodes right here on YouTube. So until next time, take care of one another. Be excellent to each other.