 Our next speaker has invested hundreds of hours into research on remote work. In this talk, Karini will share what she learned about building high-performing remote cultures and teams. At the core of the findings are quite a bit of overlap with values that are core to kid lab. If you are ready to level up your teams and be part of a happier and higher performing organization, you'll love this talk. I should note that while these findings are framed through the lens of remote work, the foundation here, that empathy in teams improves performance is true for all teams. No matter how distributed they may be. Enjoy. Hi, my name is Karine Tan and today I'll be presenting the skill of the future, how empathy transforms remote teams. But about me, I'm co-founder of Kona, the wellness platform for remote teams. We've been building this product since January, 2020 and it's based off of 550 interviews that we've done since then with remote managers across the world. We've been really fortunate to have the time and generosity of all these great leaders and this presentation covers some of our key learnings and the main problem set that we've discovered that we're building Kona around. Needless to say, I am super, super excited to be talking about this with you today. So to dive into our agenda, we'll first go from a high level talking about the transformative power of trust for remote teams. We'll start by talking about the absence of culture and what happens when a company struggles with this culture. Then we'll go into how to measure trust and trust impact on an organization. We'll talk about values and how values can provide a blueprint for your company culture. Then we'll go from a low level talking about empathy, how it's the skill that every single remote manager can build in order to scale not only culture but also trust, how it solves the remote work paradox and how managers can basically be the solution for an entire company's success. Then we'll leave you with some actionable items that we are not just walking away with a lecture but you'll walk away with some learnings for today. So to kick us off, the transformative power of trust for remote teams. I like to start this discussion off by asking the question, what makes a good company culture? Now, if I ask Google, it'll tell me the attitudes and behaviors of a company, but even that definition can leave a lot to be desired. I know that people make a great culture, values, traditions make a great culture, but I also know that toxic companies also have great people, great values and great traditions oftentimes. So we know a good culture when we see one. We hear employees talk about how great their companies are all the time. We know a bad culture because people will be very quick to walk away, but it helps to know where culture falls apart and where it comes into play. So here's a few examples. You might have heard the story already. Just this past April based camp CEO Jason Freed announced a policy banning societal and political discussions at work. This was in response to a racist list of names that had surfaced, leaving many employees very uncomfortable and frustrated. And instead of addressing it right away, it addressed it in a memo, leaving a third of its people to leave after the memo was released. Goldman Sachs Marcus division also saw 10% of their total employee headcount leave. That's a quarter of their engineers after citing burnout, poor leadership and the waterfall effect where one person leaves and the entire team follows. Finally, along a whole string of unfortunate scenarios, we have Cloud Kitchen run by ex Uber CEO Travis Kalanak. It saw 300 employees leave in a mass resignation just this past April. Many cited secrecy, a bro culture and really heavy red tape inhibiting their employee success. Right now we're facing something called the great resignation. We're seeing a record number of Americans quit their jobs breaking all previous records and such. And a lot of employees are returning to the office but they're really assessing whether or not they should stay. That's because if they wanna know whether or not a company not just speaks about values but actually holds them up and fights for them as people. When we look at how all these companies fell apart, we can look to Patrick Guancey on these five dysfunctions of a team. We'll know that the whole, if you look at all these five different examples, the main reasons why people leave and why teams fell apart, it has nothing to do with the technical. It's always about culture. At the base at its foundation is the absence of trust. And as you saw from the section, we'll be talking about trust a lot. Well, trust provides a foundation for the other four. The, when we talk about trust, we're talking about the fear of mistakes not being able to be open about mistakes and therefore not being able to be open about their solutions. We're talking about ego, the lack of vulnerability and the kind of armoring up as Renee Brown describes. We're also talking about the fear of failure and the fear of allowing other folks to basically see that failure as a sign of weakness, perhaps. And when you don't have that foundation of trust, you lead to the other four problems, the fear of conflict, the lack of commitment, the avoidance of accountability and the inattention to results. If you take nothing else from this presentation, please take away this. Trust provides the foundation and therefore by focusing on trust, you'll be able to resolve the other four major dysfunctions of a team. Now, Patrick Lanciani's also cited for saying that teamwork is your company's biggest strategic advantage. And this line of thought absolutely held up through all of our interviews with remote managers. Like I said, we've talked to a lot of them, 550 since January, 2020. And that was like 300 hours of Zoom calls, talk about Zoom fatigue, but everything was worth it to come to this one conclusion. Trust literally transforms remote teams. We've had the great pleasure of talking to some of the best companies in the world. That's the winners of Glassdoor's best place work, some of the other great culture athletes out there. And these companies that win these awards, they always put trust and empathy at the front and center of their culture strategy. Trust transforms remote teams, like I said, and we totally saw this happen with, for example, Hubstaff, which has two teams spread across 19 different time zones. For fully distributed teams, trust acts as glue. It increases productivity, allows them to collaborate better and maintains alignment, despite all that distance. However, don't just take my word for it. Trust Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School who's done extensive research on psychological safety and trust throughout her career. She defines psychological safety as the belief that no one will be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. In order to achieve this state of psychological safety, you need to have that base foundation of trust that we've been talking about. And Google actually studied this and found that it's the number one factor for effective teams. The PeopleOps team has cited as saying that teams that prioritize higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, bring in more revenue, and they're rated twice as effective by executives. So when you do not have psychological safety, the opposite happens. You have 50% more turnover, 60% more errors, 18% lower productivity, and 37% lower job growth. It's really clear that trust is this key factor, that it empowers remote teams and can destroy them at the same time. So the key question is, how can we use our company culture to ensure that we can build this trust? And I ask this question because toxic cultures have cultures too. They list their values on their homepage. They ensure that they make every employee know traditions. However, where they go wrong is that these company values are not practiced. GitLab's handbook cites to be effective and to impact culture in an ongoing, meaningful, sustainable way. Values must be more than words on a page. They must be lived. And that's great. That makes total sense, but it's a lot easier said than done. So let's look at GitLab and see how they're actually able to live those values. GitLab's core values include credit. It's a really cute acronym that describes how they give credit to one another. And this stands for collaboration, results, efficiency, diversity, inclusion and belonging, iteration and transparency. These values first get baked into all of GitLab's processes. They guide everything including hiring, onboarding, software promotions. They even write little song books about them. It's really cute. But in addition to that, it's kind of vague because collaboration, it can be very ambiguous. What does collaboration mean to so many different people? So GitLab goes out of their way in their handbook to make sure that they describe different subvalues of each value. So folks know what folds up into collaboration. For example, one collaboration subvalue is get to know each other. That is interesting because we don't often think of get to know you as part of collaboration. However, GitLab knows that in order to collaborate effectively, you need to have that baseline of trust. And so part of collaboration is taking break calls and virtual coffee chats and GitLab contribute things that might not directly seem productive, but lead to that value of collaboration long term. They also have a subvalue called assume positive intent. Again, rooted in a lot of trust because when you're fully asynchronous like GitLab is and you're fully relying on written documentation, you need to be able to assume that the other person writing that message wasn't having your worst interest at heart. And this value, this baseline of trust allows folks to really reduce miscommunication and lead to a lot clearer collaboration. The next one, transparency. GitLab is incredibly transparent and they make this a principle. We've actually seen this as the key factor of success for a lot of around teams. They are public by default, which is quite radical. They list everything out in their handbook. They document everything and they put everything in GitLab issues, virtual requests, any teammate in the GitLab company can add input on different aspects that are documented and such. That's how I got all these values to it. I can see a lot of things in the handbook. And so by making a public by default company that requires a lot of trust, trust of other employees, trust of the public. And in that, GitLab is able to really prioritize and demonstrate how much they prioritize transparency as a value. They also make a subvalue of articulate when you change your mind, which I really love because that requires so much trust to be able to say I was wrong and let's focus on a solution together. And so as you can see, every single value is rooted in the baseline of trust, targeting trust as basically an outcome. GitLab CEO says this, similar to happiness trust is something that is an outcome. It's not something you necessarily strive for directly. And so the way that they line their values, the way that they measure their processes, everything should be a forcing factor for trust. And that's where teams go right. That's where trust succeeds and that's how culture can scale trust long-term. Now that's great, but it's a lot easier said than done. How do you make sure that it's not just the top down saying this, how do you make sure that you're actually able to put trust into daily action, put all these values into daily action when you have the tornado of deadlines, the tornado of needs and asks of a team. And that'll be the topic of our next section, how empathy is the skill that every single remote manager can build in order to put these values into action. Now, the reason we're dedicating an entire section to this low-level material is because trust is really easy to define at a high level. You can have people ops teams defining culture, values, et cetera, and you can still have trust fail at an organization. That's because trust depends on those micro relationships, the relationships between a manager and a teammate. So let's look at trust in its most fundamental state. Brene Brown Sight's trust is choosing to make something important to you, vulnerable to the actions of someone else. When we think about it, it's really, really simple. It's a vulnerability trust feedback loop. When you can be vulnerable, when you can show your human side, your mistakes, your flaws, and have that be rewarded with kindness, care, and attention, then that builds trust. And with more trust, you can be vulnerable more often. And so this is about being human at work, and that's the beautiful part, but it's also notoriously difficult to be human when we're completely virtual and completely online. Trust is notoriously difficult to build a remote environment. It requires deliberate effort. You have to book that one-on-one, book that meeting, book that heart-to-heart conversation between the hours of 4.30 and 5. And so in order to overcome that, there's, it requires a lot of skill on the people behind the screens. Among all of our research in this held up, the number one problem was relationship building and loneliness. That's really saying something across 550 managers who could have been complaining about Zoom fatigue, burnout, et cetera. So of these, these were some of the testimonials. You can't tap somebody's shoulder while remote. It's hard to tell how someone's feeling. You have to be deliberate about having conversations and hanging out. And the energy, ease of conversation, kind of body language you would get in a remote office just isn't the same. And so loneliness in relationship building are some of the biggest issues, but it's also because managers are facing huge hurdles. Over this 37 respondents, 37% of respondents had little to no experience managing at all prior to son and work from home. And then you add on larger team sizes. 72% of companies are increasing hiring. And so team sizes are swelling to seven direct reports per manager. As a result, you get a lot of burnout. Managers are already struggling to manage the tasks of their job, the kind of productivity that they're measured by that they can kind of lose sight of the relationship building and trust that deteriorates the case over time and leads to long-term team failure. And so that's the remote paradox. That's the paradox of remote trust. Remote teams cannot succeed without trust and yet remote work makes trust one of the most difficult things to build. This paradox is the key reason why most companies don't want to work remote first. The reason why so many folks are moving towards a hybrid model isn't because employees can't be productive while remote. It's because they can't be trust building while remote. And so when we know that, we know that that actually can be resolved and it can be resolved with empathetic people first remote managers. Now we'll break the solution down to a few parts starting with empathy. We can find empathy as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I like that they use the word ability in the definition because it truly is a skill. And it's a skill that remote managers can hone in order to open the doors of trust. There's a quote out there that says, empathy only requires a single passive person to feel for someone else and trust requires the willing vulnerability on both sides. If we can think of it as a door, empathy cracks it open. But empathy requires some practice. It requires emotional intelligence. We can understand emotional intelligence with Daniel Goldman's Four Quadrants. Self-awareness, social awareness, self-management and relationship management. Do I know myself? Do I know those around me? Am I able to manage my own triggers and can I manage the feelings of those around me? This is difficult. I'm not gonna pretend that it isn't. However, when empathetic managers can unlock this skill, they gain superpowers. They can build a sixth sense for supporting teammates in a remote setting. They can give better feedback. They can build trust through words and actions. They guide teammates through conflict and change which I'm sure we've had a lot of this year and last. Remote managers that build their empathy can break the remote trust paradox. And that's why Google has named empathy as a skill of the future. Their chief innovation evangelist, Frederick, I'm gonna put you his last name. Empathy is a skill of the future. Practicing empathy every day as a business leader can help you understand what your employees need and what your immediate team needs right now. It is a skill and it's a skill that we can teach our most important leaders to have so they can scale it across an entire organization. So where do remote managers come into play? Remote managers are the key to scaling culture across an entire organization. A lot of folks make the mistake of thinking that culture is only top down, that people ops company leadership, they're the sole people responsible for dictating values and running certain processes. However, this doesn't work unless every single person at the company lives these values, meaning remote managers are key. As folks in charge of their teams, they're the sole person responsible for enforcing values, meaning that if we can approach it from both a top down and bottom up standpoint, you can scale culture as a whole. Now, let's imagine if every single manager led with empathy, you would have company cultures that completely aligned their values and their processes. You'd have folks that are treated as holistic human beings. You'd have a lot more thoughtful conversations and just care for one another and that in itself makes for a fantastic company culture. So that's our philosophy behind Kona. That's why we've been building this since January, 2020 where the people first culture platform for remote teams and we believe that by scaling culture best practices on the micro scale, we can actually bring teams and entire companies closer together. We're able to see among our initial users, we have some amazing beta testers and customers, we've been able to bring them closer as friends and people where the customers are able to better address blockers and have tough conversations when they have that foundation of trust and they're able to do this all in a fully remote setting. So with 37% of managers managing remotely for the very first time, it's more important than ever to encourage better training, tools and skills necessary for allowing managers to lead with empathy. As promised in the beginning, here's a few ways you can start employing empathy inside your everyday remote team processes. That way you as a remote manager can help your entire company culture succeed. Let's start with kind of the framework of Daniel Goldman's four quadrants. So starting with self-awareness, the conscious knowledge of one's characters, feelings, motives, et cetera. It's about knowing yourself. So a few things that could help. Personality tests, work with me guides, those are often very, very helpful. Bonus points, if you do personality tests as a bonding activity or kind of a one-off, it's very helpful to constantly reference back to these. You can also make it a habit to ask for feedback from your reports and your own manager often. Oftentimes we have a unconscious kind of bias. We don't really know what we don't know. And so it's helpful to have others as a sort of mirror to understand how we show up for them. In addition, it helps to also take breaks to journal, meditate, building this kind of mindfulness will allow you to think more reflectively and work that muscle so you can build that self-awareness. Another thing, of course, is social awareness. That's the next quadrant. And so this is about kind of taking the perspective and empathizing with others, mainly your teammates. The way to do that is first with gratitude. It really helps to show thanks and to be able to celebrate wins of the entire team. And there's a lot of research showing that gratitude has a lot of benefits for mental health, productivity, et cetera. We also recommend, and you probably already do this, but conducting weekly one-on-ones to talk about life outside of work. A few tools like soapbox, et cetera. Now, hypercontext, by the way, they're fantastic for making sure that your one-on-ones cover not only the tactical, but every single element. And building trust during these weekly touch points is very, very essential. And the next thing is to celebrate culture, learn, and volunteer as a team. It allows you to make sure that you can look outside yourself, really see the outside world and realize there's a lot to life outside of just what we do and set our little four-corner Zoom screens. The next quadrant is self-management. This is about managing traders. This is a little bit difficult because you need to have the other two as a foundation. But once you're able to master the first two, or at least get a little bit good on it, you can start to brush up on certain soft skills through coursework and books that those kind of soft skills will allow you to learn a little bit more about where your triggers are, what certain things are affecting your work, for example, your leadership. Next, I would highly recommend learning how to conduct tough conversations. These sort of tough conversations should be embraced, essentially, when we are able to have tough conversations we're able to innovate, we're able to come up with solutions, and we're able to work together. It's a true test of trust, so I'm not gonna pretend that it's easy, but if you're able to approach conflict in a very healthy manner, then you'll be able to really practice self-management. And the next thing is something that a lot of people don't necessarily think about. Keep an eye on your mood, burnout, and PTO. Are you taking an adequate time number of days off? Are you able to make sure that you're not arriving to work tired all the time? These certain aspects of self-management really make sure that you're able to become your best person at work whenever you show up. Please get some sleep, yes, of course, and that's all part of self-management. And the last thing is social awareness. This is what we usually equate as empathy, the ability to recognize other people's emotions and act accordingly. This is a skill that we constantly need to exercise. And even if you're still working on the first three, there is no mastery, of course. There is definitely steps that you can take to start to build your social awareness. I recommend opting for asynchronous check-ins. It avoids Zoom fatigue and allows you to still check in with folks as people. We're not talking about your daily stand-up message of I'm working on this. We're talking about a, this is what I'm thinking about, this is what I'm currently feeling, this is what's going on in my world. I also recommend having, be able to facilitate meetings, basically, and ensure that everybody has a chance to speak. It's really crucial to understand the different kind of communication styles on your team and act accordingly, making sure that everybody feels heard and that all opinions are listened to. And the last thing is incorporating other departments and stakeholders. This is really difficult because it's already difficult enough to kind of manage your own team, but by being able to manage different relationships outside of your direct team, you'll be able to help build that kind of empathy and trust as an entire org. So here's the key takeaway. After, thank you so much for listening to this long presentation, but trust starts with empathy and everyone in your remote company can take part. By scaling it from the top down and bottom up, you'll be able to bring forward your best organization possible. And a lot of happiness comes when folks feel like they can be themselves at work. Thank you so so much for listening. It's been a pleasure to do this presentation and share a little bit of what we've been working on. Please continue to ask questions as necessary. Thank you.