 Welcome to the Business in Hawai'i Show. I'm John Strandberg. We are broadcasting live from my office in Waikiki. If you want to tune in, we are at www.thinktechhawaii.com. While there, please subscribe to our program to get on our mailing list. The theme of Business in Hawai'i is to share with you stories of local businesses by local people. Our guests share with us their journey to building a successful business right here at home in Hawai'i. In the ThinkTech studios today is my good friend, David Earls. David, thank you so much for joining us today and welcome to the show. Welcome. Thank you, John. I appreciate it. Not in the studio. Obviously, we're all remote today, aren't we? Yes, we are. This COVID-19 crisis has us all working remotely and from everywhere. And that's actually the theme of our show today, is how to get the best use of remote workers and how do you work from home or wherever you might be. So, David, before we go on, tell us more about you and your connection to Hawai'i and where are you now? Let's see. Where am I now? Good question. I could be anywhere in the world at the moment. Couldn't I? It's kind of fun. I was in Hawai'i for 22 years, did a lot of marketing and fundraising work in the nonprofit world. And then a year, a little over a year ago, I had an opportunity to move to Washington, D.C. and work for Adventist Development Relief Agency. It's a church-based humanitarian relief agency. I'm their lead fundraiser. Kind of hard to turn down the opportunity to literally travel the world and raise money for causes throughout the whole world. It's an amazing experience. I still get back to Hawai'i often. I miss it when I'm not there. And obviously, we're all working from home these days. So, I've done a lot of different things. At one point, I was the executive director for the Hawai'i Math Project. I ran the Honolulu Zoo Society for a couple of years, done a number of different things along the way. Yeah, I think when I first met you, you were working for CASEL, right? CASEL Hospital was your marketing director. Correct. A long, long time ago, and we'll move on from there. Yeah, if anybody needs anything on our host, just let me know. I've got a couple tidbits I could share. Oh yeah, I'm sure I got some on YouTube, buddy. Well, let's go back to talking about working remote. A few years ago, I remember you were being featured in Pacific Business News as one of the people that pioneered working remote. So, can you share with us some tips and tricks when you're doing that back then? Sure. So, I got a little obsessed, let's just say, with working in a coffee shop environment. I went to Harvard, Starbucks, or Kisaten, were my two primary places. Something about that white noise environment, something about having people and activity going on around you, and yet not really being bothered by them, created, I don't know, creative juices inside me, and I was able to really get a lot more done. So, in fact, when I was at the Hawai'i Math Project, we had donated space downtown, nice office space all to ourselves for four staff, and I realized it cost us more in parking fees than what it would cost if I gave every one of our staff $100 gift card every month to Starbucks for internet access, and we would do our meetings there, and as we traveled the state doing our work, we would just literally meet at the Starbucks in the closest area we were mostly at. We did that for a number of years. There was probably a 12-year period, Starbucks was my primary office as I did consulting and other things. Not just Starbucks, you mentioned another coffee shop favorite of ours, Kisaten. This is true. Starbucks is kind of the one when you can't find a good local one, but of course, in Kailua, you've got Morning Brew, and that was my go-to place there, and then in town, Kisaten Cafe was the other one. I really liked that one, too. That PBN did an article on working remote, and they did a wonderful little picture. I don't know how they make pictures of me look good like that, but they did one. There is one floating out there with me holding my little laptop and just doing all the other things you do to make sure you've got your hotspot off your phone, all the other pieces you need in order to be able to be completely remote when you're driving down the road, being able to pull over and still get the emails responded to appropriately, that sort of thing. That was back in that day. Let's talk about that now. We can't exactly go to the coffee shop because we're all stuck. A few of us are actually essential workers. We have to report into an office space or wherever we work. Most of us are actually sitting at home now. What tips do you have for that home worker that would make it easier to work from home to stay productive and report in? The first most important tip is wear pants. What can I say? Just get it out there. It's kind of fun. In my job now, I'm very remote often. I last year drove or flew, I should say. I flew 110,000 miles in the air, just back and forth across the US a lot, but to Africa, Europe, Asia as well. We got very used to Zoom meetings. I was introduced to Zoom while working there. Skype was the one we all knew growing up, but Zoom has some amazing tools to be able to get people to collaborate together. Nowadays, especially in this environment with COVID-19, everyone has heard of Zoom. Everybody uses it. It's really interesting though to watch the change go on in how people perceive what it takes to be ready for a Zoom call. In the past, you would make sure you put on your shirt with a collar, right? You'd comb your hair. You'd do all the other things that you needed to do to look presentable. You'd make sure you're on a back wall where nobody could see your space. Nowadays, I sat on a call yesterday with 108 people in the room in the chat, and you could all communicate with each other. Three-quarters of them were obviously sitting on their couch, and probably half of them were eating or doing other things. That's acceptable at least in today's environment while we're quarantined. I'm curious if that will continue at that level of casualness once we're no longer quarantined, but I'm guessing it actually will be acceptable at some level. In my past, I've participated in a lot of conference calls where I would be dressed in a shirt-tied jacket, standing up and doing a presentation on a whiteboard, and it's always been that's how conference calls should be, but you're right. I've been seeing a lot of people recording Zoom calls, and I've seen everything from eating to drinking to driving even as they're participating. I haven't seen that yet. There's a couple of links I might share with you later. People doing other things that the net are not appropriate for the show. I've seen those. Yes, I have seen those, but yes. I'm intrigued. Go ahead. At the same time, I'm curious as to how can they prepare, because you, as far as I've known, you've always been prepared for everything. So how did you prepare yourself to do this? So probably the most important thing, and it's a real trick, is to make sure your internet is strong enough. Everybody thinks they've got good internet at home, or everybody thinks they can just run down the street and grab some Wi-Fi. It's amazing how stressful it is, and for some reason that doesn't quite work right. My phone, I'm not allowed to tether off of, because we have corporate phones that actually have international calling. I can go anywhere in the world and be on a phone call all day long. Somehow AT&T doesn't like us tethering that as well. So you have to be prepared with some form of a really strong Wi-Fi in order to make that work. I mean, it's basics. That's the number one thing is Wi-Fi. After that, make sure your camera isn't all smudged. It's amazing how many people have fingerprints on their computer camera, and the quality of what you're looking at is just really blurry. Clean that off every time before you get on a call, before you start talking. Make sure you've got your cell phone nearby, because guaranteed if you're talking with three or four people, one of them is going to text you along the way something on the side. Even though there's really good private chats inside Zoom, we're still used to using just a regular text message. At my job, we also use WhatsApp a lot because it's international and it seems to be used a lot internationally. Every time we gear up for a big group type of a conversation, there's a new WhatsApp group that's created just for the people involved. And sometimes that's not just for this one conference call. This is for a project, something else we're doing. We use WhatsApp as a group messaging service. We haven't used Slack as much as I would like us to, but that may be coming. I've used it a couple times here in organizations. Slack is a great one too. It also integrates well back into the telephone. So it's got the app as well there. But for us right now, we're using WhatsApp as our group text messaging and then Zoom for most of the rest of what we do. I fight hard to keep my computer as super small as I possibly can, travel ready, good, strong battery, always have an extra battery pack somewhere around, and though rarely nowadays do I run out in one day, you can usually plug in somewhere. The longer cable you got, the better just to be able to have things always able to move around where you need to with charging. I actually carry with me a double set of every single cable I could imagine in a little Ziploc pack. And then that's, I just know it's there, whether I'm going to throw in a suitcase or whether I'm going to be just sitting at my table. It's just sitting there as an additional, I don't have to go where in the world's that cable because I've always got one extra one sitting in the zippered up little pockets. You know, coming from a guy who's working in the IT industry, that makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking about it too. I have double of everything. One in my briefcase, one at the office, and actually even one at home for most of my cables and charging needs. And how often do you still scramble to find it though, right? I mean, it happens to all of us. But I never thought to keep it near me as I'm working from home. That's a distraction from home or what prevents me, in my opinion, from working at home more. Because I'm thinking, oh, there's dirty sink. The dog needs to be fed. The dog needs to get for a walk. Oh, I got food in my refrigerator. What's for lunch? John, I want to back up. You do the dishes? Yes, I do. Just curious. Just check it. I caught that. The distractions of day to day work from home life. How do you keep that from getting into your work? So I can't help but have my cell phone beside me, almost in my hand. It bothers me if it's in my pocket. I don't know why. I carry that cell phone around everywhere. And I realize there are people that try to unplug and not do that. I find if I don't respond right away to a message, they pile up and I get behind. And I'm the kind of person who would rather just deal with it as it's there and as the situation occurs, unless I'm in the middle of a social setting. But my cell phone is always close to me at home, and so I allow that to come into my home life. But typically when I do real work, that's why I started gravitating towards a coffee shop, somewhere that wasn't home. I've had a home office before, and if I really needed to do work, I'd go in there and close the door. Whether or not anyone else is home, when I close that door, I'm in a work mode, and that helps me a lot. Yeah, like you have kids, and my kids always tend to bother me at the least opportune time, middle of typing on an email, or I could be on a conference call and dad, dad, dad, and that's what prompted me to, okay, I'm going to work and staying there for as long as I can. Then when I'm at home, I dedicate it for a home. So my girls have learned dad stays away a lot often, but now as they're older down the house, I find that I don't have as many distractions, but I'm still distracted. And I'm not looking forward to longer days of this quarantine where we're all stuck from home. So my other question is, you have everything you need. You mentioned all your tools are in place. What else can we do to help be more productive at home? Wear pants. I told you that from the beginning. Wear pants. So I've heard that you always want to dress up as if you are going to work, even though you're sitting at home. Absolutely right. No, it's funny because I mean, you see people, and I've seen photos nowadays, people online bragging about their attire to be at work at home, but you're not at work when you do that. And I'm very casual. I enjoy dressing down, but I too, I often, I mean, I had a polo shirt on earlier today. It just was branded with a logo I didn't want when I did this. So I changed. But I put on something besides a t-shirt when I'm at work, even if it's at the Starbucks or wherever I'm going, even in DC, for sitting at a coffee shop. I make sure I'm wearing clothing that I feel like is my work clothes. Get in that mindset. Answer your phone professionally, even if you know it's your buddy. Make sure that you're in that work mode during the hours you're supposed to be at work. And then when I'm home, if a work call comes in at nine o'clock at night, I may or may not answer it as professionally because that's my way of kind of shutting down some of those thought processes. And of course, if it's somebody important, I'll definitely answer it professionally. But off work hours, I think it's important for all of us to acknowledge even to each other when we're working that this isn't a normal thing to be working during off work hours. Same thing goes the other way around. It's important for us to acknowledge during a work day, even if we're on quarantine, that we're at work. So you adhere to your standard work shift, I'd say eight to five, depending on your business. For me, I come in office at 7.30 and leave at six o'clock. That's my work hours. Do you say I should do the same at home? During this time I would say yes. But not normally. And it's real different if you're a business owner. If you're the top person in the organization, you're not going to hold business hours. You know that when you wake up in the morning, you've got eight emails you've got to respond to before you crawl out of bed to go shower, to go get a cup of coffee, right? So it's a very different world for those of us who are leading an organization or trying to be taking care of more than just a normal work day. You can't shut off all the time. But I think it's real important for everyone possible to have that balance in their life where they do shut off. Whether they leave their phone beside the door at least when they go walk the dog. Okay, leave the phone there. And trust me, that's hard. It's not easy to leave the phone, take it out of my hand and know that it's not going to be there for 45 minutes to an hour. That's not an easy thing. But that's an important part of just keeping your sanity as you go about trying to work in a non-work environment, a traditional work environment. Most of the media is rift with people working from home. I see posts all the time. Prepping for lunch at 9 a.m. Fred might actually post that. He's like, I've already decided on mech and cheese. It's 9 a.m. for lunch. I'm jealous, by the way. My response to that was, you know, make sure you had a good bottle of wine to go with that. What are your thoughts on, you know, you're at home and you're on work hours. Is it okay to have that beard lunch or a martini? Really? Do I have to admit this? Are we recording this right now? So, from my perspective, I would say as long as you're not on video, do what you want to feel comfortable to keep your sanity, especially during these times. I think if you're not quarantined at home, I would say probably less of that is better. But while you're quarantined, everybody, forgiveness is definitely going to occur everywhere in this world with what's going on. When you're home, you can be at home. We've had some major emails going out to all of us inside Adra, telling us, please unplug, you guys, because you can see the workflow flying across the ethernet, basically, all hours of the day and night, because you are home and right now, everyone is going, well, I was working during the day. I shut it down for an hour. At 10 o'clock at night, they're opening it again. They're the line staff who typically would never do such a thing. And so there is this problem of everyone just feeling they need to stay connected all the time. And it's real important you unplug, shut off the computer and disappear. And I think that's important for managers, too, to understand you're not always going to be able to reach people immediately, like you used to be able to walking around the corner and just saying, hey, Bill, what's going on? Because they're not in an office. They're at home. They shut off their computer to eat lunch at 3 in the afternoon because they didn't at noon. And you need to be able to accept that and maybe text them if you've got to have an answer right away. But other than that, we've actually got people that are leaving on their Zoom office almost like all day long while they're there and you can just ding them just as if you're around the corner and you say, hey, Carla, are you in the office right now? I need to ask a question. And they just answer because Zoom is something you can leave on depending on the level of what you've got for an account. And so a number of us during the work day just simply leave it on as a part of what we're doing in the corner of our computer and people could just ding into that chat and continue to work as if you're still connected and you are. And even then, that's an important factor for socialization. I discovered that I'm not a winner. What did you figure that out, John? Just sitting here alone for a week in the office and it's like every few minutes, I actually get outside of my building just to see other people hopefully walking the streets. Just to go, okay, there's others around me, there are people working and it's just talking to my own workmates. I work in small companies. After talking to them five times in a day, you almost want to talk to somebody different and you look forward to that interaction, right? And they do too, by the way. Having Zoom on almost 24-7 at home, that just seems too excessive. No, no, I'm not saying 24-7. I'm saying do it like during your office hours. If you're working 7.30 to 5, turn it on when you sit down at 7.30 and with Zoom on like that, it's in your own private chat room. If you're not instantaneously seeing or talking to you, they're just able to ding you basically and then you turn them on and say, oh, yeah, hi, or not. So leave it on in the corner. I know people that do it and I have a couple times. So it's just your office hours when you're available and it makes it only during the day, never at night, never other times. I mean, I'm one of these people that if you text me at 3 in the morning, I reply. But that's not the norm and that's probably twisted because of the extra gray hairs because of it. But it's just who I am. At least you have the gray hair. Mine's going backwards. I've got plenty. I chop it off often, but that's real great. Three kids. Yeah, so we're at home. We're working. We're trying to be as productive as we possibly can. How do you respond to a manager that says, I don't think you're really working and you didn't respond to my text immediately? Right. Yeah, so there's a few things I would suggest on that because I do have quite a team that I, and they all have different work habits and some of them I don't please don't watch this. I hope they're not watching this and won't find it. But yeah, there's a couple like question, how much they actually do work, whether that's in the office or whether it's anywhere else. I'm trying to manage that now. To me, especially now, it's important as a manager to be very, very precise about the expectations of anyone that you're asking to get work done. Find a way to give them a true list of check off boxes of here's what I need done and by when. And I mean, we're all humans. We appreciate having some form of accountability. It may be tough at first because if you haven't had that accountability in the office and you've gotten away with more coming home, you think you've really got free reign. But in this environment, and especially anytime you're working remotely, it's really critical that you have clear expectations of what work needs to be accomplished and by when. I think if you've got a job where you're just supposed to be there and keep things moving, you're going to struggle. But if you've got a job where you've got projects and you know that they're needing to get done as a manager, especially will know whether or not the projects are done, whether they're done right and within a time frame. And you just have to probably in this time just trust your staff a little bit because they don't have much choice. Yeah, well the government forced us into this with their edicts about stay at home, work from home. But a lot of employers aren't prepared to do that. I have friends that are teachers. They're preparing lesson plans now. They teach classes and a lot of parents and my neighbors are one of them, they're freaking out. It's like, okay, I have to teach my kids how to study from home, not in the classroom setting where I myself have a difficult time with it. And they're asking me, I'm like, I don't ask me too many questions. I can help you with the IT side of things, setting it up for you, but it's individuals that have to make that choice. So that leads me to what else can you think of and want to share about working from a non-traditional work environment? I think I've kind of touched on the one that's to be the most critical is find a space to work in. Take that laptop and carry it all over the entire house and work from anywhere and everywhere. Especially the couch. I landed the laptop screen on my nose just the other day. You sit on your couch, lay on your couch pretty soon, you're chatting in the next so you know your eyes are closing and it flops over. Pick a space that works for you. Set it up comfortably. The chair you sit in, you know how we're all ergonomic at work by and check all the time is the counter at the right height. Is that chair working? Is there lumbar support? I guarantee none of us have those things at home. None of us have it set up because we haven't ever had an HR person come to our house and double check the ergonomics of the chair we eat dinner in and yet I'm currently sitting in the chair I eat dinner in when I'm home and I'm sitting here talking to you for 30 minutes and not moving other than my head bouncing around. Probably my lips a little bit so it's you've got to find a way to take care of yourself in that space in ways we don't think of especially if this is going to go for weeks and weeks and weeks. So again, the things that are important are find a space that works for you make sure it's comfortable for you make it home at the same time put the bottle of wine or something across the room as an incentive for when you're done whatever it takes to be incentivized but make sure you get in the mindset of what it takes to be able to accomplish the work you need to get done. The nowadays all the digital list managers and things if you're going to be living on a computer more now than ever I use a little app called moment on my phone and it just kicks up to-do lists for me and every day it reminds me of the things that I put on the to-do list that typically I add at three in the morning when I wake up and it kicks up in the morning and tells me those things something like that that's a new different reminder find one that you just haven't used before this is the time to test out and see whether it works for you because your workflow is changing and so now you can disrupt it with a different technology try it out if you're a teacher or a parent the thing to keep in mind is your kids are ahead of you I guarantee it no matter what they are far ahead of you when it comes to how the technology works so take advantage of that take this to be a time for them to teach you the things that they know how to do well I got admit I was talking to somebody recently just last week who was working on a platform to teach teachers how to teach remotely and he says David you wouldn't believe it but I'm having to teach teachers how to right click us on a mouse I said yeah that's window 95 training right to those of us in the world that work every day in tech that's different but there are parents and teachers out there that don't ever need to use a computer in their normal life and all of a sudden their kids and others are having to do it and they're having to learn it because we're all locked up at home so patience is another big piece of all of this I think is be aware that you may have employees even who are really good at what they do but all of a sudden they're having to learn a different size keyboard at home because you give them a laptop to go home and they've got a different keyboard at work and in fact it'd be really hard for them to find the exact same one and they didn't grab it before the office was permanently semi-permanently locked it feels like permanently forever we're out of our offices right but for some time they can't go grab that keyboard patience is an important piece of this as we all learn so we're running out of time but really quickly do you see us as a business changing our models after this crisis passes because now we realize staff don't need to be here all the time I hope so I mean there's no reason for many of us to drive into work every day and this is proving it and if we can somehow find a way in many businesses to stay productive without having to spend all the gas and all the time to drive into work and to drive back home after work and have less of a real life then I really hope this does make a permanent lasting difference in how we do what we do I mentioned I traveled 110,000 miles in the air I don't know how much of that I could have done remotely but I'm sure some and I'll probably think different about it as whenever we can start flying again based on the fact technology has changed for all of us and now it's immediately and all of a sudden much more ubiquitous in our life okay well thank you David we are out of time thank you for joining me on Joe one big thank you to the great production staff at studio doing this video remote control if you'd like to be a guest on the show please like us subscribe and leave a comment or just email the show at shows at thinktecawai.com and we'll work on getting you on business in Hawaii airs every Thursday at 2pm look forward to seeing you here next week aloha