 Hey everyone, I'm Scott Shagiyoka. I am GoDaddy's entrepreneur in residence and I'm here filming from my home where I'm sheltering in place. And with COVID-19, small and large businesses alike are moving everything remote. So this week I'm interviewing leaders and small business owners and asking them how they're doing that. How are they keeping their employees productive? How are they fostering community and building a strong team culture when everyone's apart? And do they think that remote work is here to stay? So next up I'm gonna be speaking to August. He's the president of Care at GoDaddy and at the start of this quarantine, he led a transition of 7,000 GoDaddy guides to work remotely from their homes all across the world. Hi August, thanks so much for joining me. I'm wondering if we could start off by you telling us what you do and what GoDaddy guides do. I lead our care and services team at GoDaddy which really means our guides and we're 7,000 guides around the world that help our customers each and every day and we do about 50,000 guided conversations every day. And tell me with COVID-19, how have you shifted with your work? There were so many things we had to learn. So we had to act and learn and innovate all at the same time. Like we didn't have the way that we can lead our team from home. We had to find new ways to do that at the same time of actually running our business and it was both incredible. It was learning and every day we just tried to get better. So as a leader, how are you thinking about leading your team from afar? What does that look like for you? It's a great question. And the first thing is, don't assume everything is normal, right? Like you're at home, you're dealing with things in a different way. You have kids running up to you. There's different kinds of distractions. The best way to lead is ask someone, how are you doing? How is everything going? Are you being saved? Having a connection to each other, number one. Number two is, don't lose sight of the mission and purpose that you're doing. So I am constantly reading customer stories to my staff. Remind your staff that you're doing something bigger than one self and that you're helping, you're truly helping other people. And that needs to be front and center. One of the struggles with remote work is isolation. Employees don't often get to see each other. We're all in our homes. So how do you maintain team culture? It's really important that we don't forget about the culture and the humanity and that we don't just think, oh, we're at home. So we're pausing our brand. In fact, the brand, your brand, your authentic brand matters most right now. Make sure that people still live with their brand, live with their color. Like I always wear pink on Wednesdays, right? We wear pink on Wednesdays in care. That's what we do. We're staying with Wednesday pink, right? We stay with some of the things that matter to us. We just brought it home. I'm curious about the conversations your guides are having with small business owners. Are you encouraging them to recommend remote work as a long-term play? Or is it more about just getting through COVID-19? Long-term play, long-term play. Look, COVID it's gonna be around probably for a little bit. We don't know when a vaccine's gonna be created and people are not gonna rush back to the stores in the same way. Folks need to look good online for the foreseeable future for years from now. They're realizing my business model needs to change a little bit. So I'll tell you one thing, Scott. Those that are gonna win in the second half of this year, they win now. They have to act now to look great online. They know that. They know coming out of this, if they look better than others, if they really have the brand out there, they're gonna be the winners. So August, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you to everyone who's helping out at this time. So next I'm talking to Tracy, who's from Zenefits. They provide HR software to small businesses and they have a really unique perspective on how small businesses are experiencing remote work right now. Hey, thank you so much for joining me. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it looks like for small businesses to go remote. I think there are just different kinds of businesses that are able to do this in different ways. So you have businesses that just, there's nothing they can do. So they're having to at least temporarily shutter their doors and you have businesses that are able to function at least partially during this pandemic with some remote work or reduced hours or reduced staff. And then there are businesses that are actually doing very well because they have a market and an ability to get things done remotely in a remote world. And those are the lucky ones. Do you think remote work is here to stay? So I think it depends on the business. Obviously, bricks and mortar kind of businesses will go back to being bricks and mortar. But I also think we're gonna see a lot more remote work. And I think that the companies that don't embrace more flexibility in the future around remote work are going to have a harder time finding great talent because I think the talent is gonna demand to have more flexibility now that they can do it. You know, what's the advice that you're giving right now to small business owners who are trying to navigate this transition? You know, what's gonna help them get through this? Taking the time now to invest in the tools that will allow your teams to function remotely is an investment worth making because remote is here to stay in some way, shape or form. The other thing would be to focus on what are the goals and productivity measures that really matter to your workforce and focus on those less on being able to see people. We're finding actually a lot of our own employees are more productive. Now, some of the metrics we use internally to track productivity, people are actually more productive working from home. So really embracing what are the productivity measures to finding those, communicating those and then measuring those. Tracy, I really appreciate your time and I wanted to thank you for joining us. So next up, I'm gonna talk to Eileen from the Lola. They are a small business that has a community space for professional women to come together, to connect, to learn from one another. And with COVID-19, they've been needing to think of creative ways to bring their members together remotely. Thank you so much for joining me and taking the time. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about your members. Our members are all working women. We have about 400 members and they span across all ages, 20-something to 70-something. They've across the board been craving conversation that probably doesn't have to do with work or the pandemic and just connecting face to face virtually with someone other than the folks that they're kind of in lockdown with. Since you're not able to provide a physical space, what are the ways that you're keeping your members connected and how are you doing that remotely? Since we closed in mid-March, we've shifted all of our programming virtually. So same time, same day, just online. And for the most part, it's been, we've had a lot of participation. So we have been recording a lot of them, sharing those recordings when we can and then also making connections offline. So we have members who are interested in meeting more new members that they haven't met before will connect them via email and they'll find time on their own time. So you have a lot of conversations with your members about this. Do you think that remote work is here to stay? I think it is, you know, silver lining. The exciting part is that almost all businesses were forced to figure out how to work remotely and even just hearing from friends and families and from our community. There have been companies that are already adjusting to that new reality because they've realized, oh, you know, we can be productive and we don't need to necessarily force everyone to be in a physical space. I'm wondering if you have any advice for small business owners. If you are like a business owner or an entrepreneur and just finding someone else who's also going through that, I think is really helpful if you find an existing community that has already gathered people that you kind of meet and feel like, oh yeah, these are my people. Thanks for sharing your wisdom about remote work and I hope you stay safe and well. So as you've heard, many businesses large and small right now are dealing with this new reality and they're trying to take their businesses remote and there's a lot of things to consider and what might have worked for us in the past may not work for us now but hopefully the insights and this video has been helpful for you as you think about your own business. And I really encourage you to leave questions and comments below and subscribe to this channel to stay up to date and if you need any resources, we have a bunch for you at OpenWeStand.org and until I see you next time, I hope you stay safe and well and thanks so much for joining me.