 All right, why don't we ooh that microphone's hot Can everybody hear me okay? Yeah, it's good Hopefully they'll get the audio started. I don't think I have to wait for any cues for the for the audio being recorded Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming. I know there's a lot of competition for the hour. So I appreciate you being here I'm Matt Westgate if you're in the virtual if you're in the room to listen to the virtual company talk You're in the right place. I am a co-founder and president of lullabot a company that was started in 2006 the reason I'm giving this talk is because we Are a distributed company of about 35 people and so we've made a lot of mistakes over the years And I get to share Some of those pain points and hopefully some of the a lot of the resolutions along the way with you as well So a little bit of background I've been with the Drupal community for about nine years. I actually knew of Drupal for about ten years or so But I first went there saw a scary floating alien head with a tagline community plumbing and quickly ran the other way It was not a very sexy platform however, I went back after frustrations with Jumla and the like that was shiny on the inside, but a little bit less on the interiors and Started to look at the source code of Drupal and what I saw in particular. This was about Drupal 4.1 They were touting the node system. They were touting the node architecture and in particular a gentleman by the name of Stephen Wittens wrote this Confesto of the node system and I absolutely fell in love with it from a source code perspective I looked under the hood and Drupal to me was like reading poetry the Comments outweigh the code and I quickly realized that I was surrounding myself with people that I was really excited to be with And it was empowering to think that there were individuals Solving the same kinds of problems that I was trying to figure out on my own I think my story is pretty similar to a lot of developers in the room and that you start rolling your own code and You know, hooray I created a way for users to log in and so has every other CMS and then you keep going along and I've created a blogging Platform and so as every other CMS and you realize You know with the 10 clients you have the 20 clients you have the 30 clients you have That you're stuck not Implementing new features, but just fixing the same bugs and Doing maintenance tasks over and over again so joining Drupal being a part of that community was an important step and eventually how Lullaby formed My initial involvement was in the e-commerce project the original implementation of the e-commerce platform And it was scary as hell to contribute It was also exciting and delicious to contribute There was there was a lot of encouragement and peer support from day one In the project and that'll come in that'll be an important aspect for my talk later on So I got started with Drupal in about 2002 2003 and in October of 2005 I was at a crossroads where I had a job working for the University Building Drupal sites for a lot of my clients, but there was also a lot of magic happening elsewhere. I had Found Jeff Robbins or more more so Jeff had found me and we started working on some Drupal projects together and I Posted this blog entry and I said I never thought I'd be doing what I'm doing right now I'm at work in my underwear pillow marks on my face and writing a blog entry. Yep. I'm a Drupal freelancer now and that was the beginning of I'd hate to overstate it and say a movement in Drupal, but I wasn't the only one and shortly thereafter a Guy by the name of Moshe Weitzman who you may know He sent an email out to the couple of the Drupal folks saying hey everybody Inspired by Matt. I'm also leaving my full-time job and taking on more Drupal work and more and more Drupal core contributors there was about There was about 60 or 90 sort of hardcore contributors at that time started taking on Freelance work started quitting their day jobs and doing more Drupal work Around that time There was a pivotal moment for me where I was talking with Jeff in the background and we were working on a project together and I Got to fly to California and work out of the adaptive path offices because that was a project that Jeff and I was working on For them and they kept telling us you guys should start a company you guys should start a company So we kind of looked at each other said Maybe we should start a company so in 2006 the beginning of 2006 I sent direct address an email and I said I want to let you know about a company Jeff Robbins and myself are forming and how I think it will benefit the Drupal community Our company name is lullabot and our goal is to provide consulting education and development using Drupal Now at this time both Jeff and I had been involved in Drupal for a number of years There was no concept of a physical office there was no concept of you know Drupal was the best example of how to work in a distributed environment And I'd go on to say that anybody working in open-source software kind of has that mojo already going for them You're working as a distributed team. You have the passion and the fights that go along with it. You Have to build collaboration tools that get out of the way and let you get your job done It was a real source of inspiration For Jeff and I and we didn't even think about a physical company Really, we just wanted to hire our friends in the community and keep doing kick-ass Drupal work so this Drupal the Drupal community showed us that it was possible to work as a distributed team I'm gonna take it one step further and say it also showed us that Drupal is a social network, right that it's a way to communicate and collaborate in lieu of being physically together and I Didn't take it one step further when I look at Distributed companies when I look at virtual companies and say that your company is a social network that you know Being a distributed company. You have to come together in a lot of different ways you have to recreate a lot of the Things that a physical company has the water cooler coming into work saying hi to your team doing more than just getting work done And I find these patterns over and over again are sort of the are sort of the cultural glue not only for the Drupal community But for how distributed communities work as well or distributed companies work as well So I want to approach this from Some of the common questions that we get about a distributed company And I put five of them down that we're gonna go through So the first one is there's no way that you can be a real company. How on earth can you do that? We're gonna take a look at that Communication is inefficient tedious There's no teamwork. How do you get things done collaboratively? It's a lonely job. What about the? isolation and There's no way it's sustainable at some point It's just all gonna all get a fall apart So let's take the first one. How can you be a real company? It is a little more difficult, but it's not impossible So this is from the lovely folks of Wikipedia a concept project called Crystal Island It's a it's a potential bill taking place in Moscow, Russia, Russia, and it's scheduled to be the biggest physical man-made structure on earth currently on hold But this is this is an interesting example of a physical company I think the term physical company came about as a sort of anti movement against Internet-based companies. So, you know before physical companies, there was the brick and mortar companies, right? And brick and mortar companies define themselves when the whole mail-ordered catalog movement came about so now You know now physical companies you can think of Like blockbuster versus Netflix. I guess that's not relevant anymore. What about I? Amazon versus border books. Oh, that's not relevant either Maybe physical companies is needs to be less of a distinction than it has than it has before Because what I'm finding is that never before has geographic location mattered less for the type of work that we do And and I think that I think that we're only going to see more and more virtual companies crop up So some other types of companies you have the physical company with virtual employees We have a we have a saying In Lullabot, and it's a little bit harsh But we say a physical company with virtual employees tends to be a physical company with alienated employees because there's Things that are happening in the office. There's culture that's happening in that physical worksprace That doesn't get translated out or communicated out to the team now. You may have Road warriors that people that travel all the time where it does it matters a little bit less because they're always out They're doing their thing, but for the most part what we see is a lot of alienation when you have to bridge that gap between a physical company and a team of virtual employees a Virtual company so there's a lot of distinction between So I don't like the phrase virtual I don't like to phrase virtual employees. I don't like the phrase virtual company and I wish it would kind of just go away Virtual somehow implies that you don't exist or that it's not real in some way We are we are real these are real people these are real companies and I much prefer Looking at it from a different lens that I'll talk about in a moment. You'll also see this this phrase virtual workers crop up and Just to be clear. That's a movement where companies are cutting their workforce and Outsourcing a bunch of freelancers to get the work done. There was a latest article about Caterpillar and they Hired 30,000 freelance workers to replace a majority of their work staff because they could play them Part-time and on an hourly basis. That's also not what we're talking about here So what do you call a company with no central office and employees spread out across across the globe? I think it needs a new name And I'm not the the first one to come up with this name But I like to I like to call it distributed company with distributed employees the first the first Ones to come up with this name is the is the folks that automatic They refer to their team. They are a completely distributed team of about 150 people And they lovingly lovingly refer to their company as a distributed company So I think as soon as you hire an employee beyond one company or beyond one country you're a distributed company and Lullabot for instance, and this this is the irony We can legally hire employees in the US in Canada in Denmark and The United Kingdom and we're working on a couple other countries too But the irony is that in order to be a distributed company. We had to have a physical presence in those countries so There's all sorts of caveats in gray areas that you're gonna run up against being a country are being a company in a single area in a single Country so just being a US-based company makes things a lot easier and often times What organizations do is they'll have US employees and Then have freelancers for the outside for outside the US that works up into a point and That point is is is when you're you know depending on them for a daily basis then the IRS may have Other opinions about that and at first that's how Lullabot started But then we had to make the switch as a majority a larger majority of our workforce Happened happened overseas So another thing is about expenses. It's it's cheaper at first That's for sure. You don't have to rent a building or or buy a building But it's it all washes out in the end. I mean to do it to do it right cost money and there's a lot There's a there's a lot of overhead that goes into Running a company, you know a lot of people say I have a saying about open-source software and that you don't go with open-source software to save money That's that's a good tagline at the beginning But the reason you go with open-source software is for the freedom and control and flexibility and to create something That's that's your own You know what you don't pay for In upfront costs you eventually pay for in human resources Right to build a team to take it to the place that you want to go. It's the same I think it's it's quite a bit the same with the distributed company You know you you pay for the people you pay for the culture And you pay less for the brick-and-mortar components of your organization There there is a lot of travel There's you know, you will you will pay for travel costs at some at some points in Lullabot's history We had a travel agent Thanks to things like Tripit and other and other online tech services that became less of a need But you still need someone to wrangle it and organize it and you do find a Lot of travel and we do meet-ups. We get together with smaller groups of our team We also have an annual retreat that we do but it's good it's good to get together and I'll talk I'll talk more about that too So as as you can tell with all of these With all of these resources you kind of need what we call a HR superhero superhero It's a lot easier if you stay in a single country and hire contractors But still you're dealing with all sorts of state laws all sorts of country laws It'll melt your brains thinking about all the things that you have to take into consideration health insurance disability life insurance 401k writing things down your your culture your values Birthday cards gift certificates all of those sorts of things HR is probably It's it's one of the most important management roles. I think that distributed organization can have Also, there's Wikipedia, which is crazy helpful in this regard. So Leave it up to the the the global Wikipedia's to document all of the facts about parental leave and make a nice little table for you to go through Or to talk about which countries allow vacation time and how much and and what you need to account for One note about health insurance There's some new laws that are coming into effect that say for a US organization to offer health insurance 51% of its employees have to be employed within that state that that bit us in the butt Probably about six months ago. We had to switch states in order to maintain our health insurance and United healthcare is one that tends to be more general about that than other organizations But again, it is that thing that in order to be a distributed organization You may have to establish a physical presence in a come in a in a state that doesn't have This this restriction But we need to keep an eye on this because it's probably going to come up again And we need to we need to communicate that there is a growing workforce That is working differently than other typical organizations work So management style in a distributed company Have you have you read Daniel Pink's book drive? Motivation 3.0 not many people have read it. I see a couple nuts So he talks about he talks about three components for motivation He talks about autonomy mastery and purpose And I think that's the best way that I can sum up a management style where you effectively can't Micro-manage right there has to be some trust and openness because it's inherently built into the structure But autonomy is your team wants to have control over their work And I think as managers our role is to inspire to empower and to facilitate collaboration Besides you can't you can't lord over them. Anyway, they're they're working from their own home So openness and autonomy is an important component Mastery people want to get better at what they do and they want to learn from each other We have a saying in Lullabot of asking the hive mind and The idea behind it is that we're all pretty tapped in into what each other is working on and we have ways To ask a question to the entire team Not only do we have that but we also have sort of a group chat running all the time where we can ping each other and ask questions bounce ideas off each other and get feedback and Creating a culture where that's that's inherent into into the organization Really meets that motivation 3.0 Qualification and also purpose right people want to be a part of something that's bigger than just themselves You know, they want to shift from the eye to the we space You know, it's it's why I got involved in Drupal You know, look what look what we can do together rather than just me as an individual I think at some point the shift will also go from and this is a little bit Zeni I apologize for that. That's my Buddhist background, but it'll go from the we to us right to all of us What can we do and what purposes are we aligning with that's just that's just bigger than the organization? And for us contributing back to Drupal fills that fills that need for us in a lot of ways But in order to do this work it in order for motivation 3.0 to kind of happen It needs to be ingrained in the culture Jason Freed from 37 signals who I take with a grain of salt at times Says culture is the byproduct of consistent behavior And what that means to me is you need to live it, right? You need to practice what you preach in a distributed company. I think it's lived through communication. It has to you know Culture comes from the top down and you need to eat your own dog food with the way that you want to work You know, you need to be the organization that you that you want to be so what I did is put together kind of a day in the life of You know, what it what it looks like to be in a distributed organization So the first thing we do is we go to work you wake up take a shower grab your coffee kiss your wife Feed the dog and head out Out of the kitchen upstairs into your office sit down drink your coffee Open up the laptop and log into IRC IRC is a group Communication tool that we use I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with it. It's it's sort of getting the ambient buzz for For the team right other people are logged in you get to see who's at work It's like it's like showing up and opening the door and punching punching the time card So that's the first thing you do hop on IRC meet your team Then the next thing we do As we say, what's everyone up to and for that we use a tool called Yammer. It's kind of like Private Twitter for business. It's a micro blogging client that we use and it's really changed the way That we communicate with each other We used to use an intranet We used to have a site called the daily report back in the early days where at the end of every day We would type what we did and worked on and sort of communicated that and broadcasted that across the team Now we use a more real-time communication Yammer for that. So what are you working on this hour? What are you doing? What do you need help with that sort of stuff? Notice that I haven't mentioned email yet As often as possible we try to go beyond the silos of email and bubble up the communication to a More broadcast based approach We use email for follow-up and a lot of client conversations But otherwise we try to bring things up into a more collaborative environment So Google Docs or we have an etherpad installation running which is like you can think of it as Google Docs light without all of the formatting but Email email tends to not be the first thing that we check in the morning So you log on to email or you log on to Yammer you go in and today's topic today's theme of the day is Workstations everybody take pictures of your workstations. Hooray So now we're all going through taking pictures of our workstations going. Holy crap. I didn't know you could do that Wow, where did you get that monitor stand? That's totally cool This is the one of the offices Lullabot offices that usually remains empty except for meet-ups And and when we bring the team down To collaborate. There's a standard standing desk Jared pawnshot standing desk. Thanks, Jared and and Everybody's just taking pictures of that and we do this often. It's a great way. It's a great way to start the day We will say what's what do you what's outside your window and everybody takes pictures of facial hair? Let's do facially, you know, and it's just it's a lot of fun to keep the keep the keep the work Keep the fun moving along on a on a day-to-day basis another great thing about a day in the life of Being a distributed employee is this distraction free work. It's a different kind of mentality I Rather than the possibility of someone coming into your office or standing at your cubicle or you know It's it's less disruptive. It's it's um, it's what we call the the ping and pong culture from the IRC world Where you can turn on your communication systems. You can also turn off your communication systems. You can also say that you're busy Phone calls tend to be scheduled Rather than ad hoc and or otherwise we use we use IRC for communicating if someone's available for To jump on the phone and and have a conversation So, you know during this time you're catching up on email prepping for meetings communicating with your team on various needs I tend to call it a mega collaboration environment For instance, you're getting ready for an interview So you fire up a go-to meeting for a video conversation and usually for our interviews will have three or four people on will have Some lullabots and then the the person that we're interviewing You know meanwhile, you've got an ether pad document open as a back channel And you're taking taking notes that the rest of the team is seeing on this candidate It's it's a documentation culture and you're always the work that you're doing tends to be In a group mentality. It tends to be in a broadcast nature Because we need to share where we we are Using the same communication tools Most conversations happen in broadcast mode. You'll come up with phrases in your organization such as cc liberally That's one that Jeff coined and you know The idea is is that when you're emailing loop other people in don't don't go down into that silo effect because you're just gonna have To tell the team about it sooner or later what's going on and what you're working on what you're thinking about So you do the interview after the call Let's say you go back working on something that you're working on in Google Docs And you know start collaborating again. You don't have to get people on the phone to collaborate You can jump in and continue where you left off and someone may already be working on the thing that you're working on You know, that's what's great about it You might want to listen to some music for a while. So we've got of course our own turntable room We have I think we have jazz music Wednesdays and Dance music Fridays so you can kick back make some hits with the team, you know All these things are really important from a cultural perspective, right? so then you go back check Yammer again and You get Comments like from Joe who's wrapping up who's wrapping up his Fridays. These are real comments He says thanks for the fun week everyone You are more awesome than a cyborg cat wearing a tuxedo made out of bacon writing on a unicorn with a lightsaber for a Horn inside of a flaming space shuttle that is on track to orbit Mars and Then you refresh the screen and holy crap Sally young just put a picture together the whole damn thing Things like this happen often But you know the important part about this is is culture right is is ways to communicate and to collaborate And it gets you out of that out of that silo mode so some other things on whether or not This is a real company or a real company model Recruitment how does recruitment work in a distributed company? You can hire you can hire the best of the best you don't have to be confined to a specific geographic location That was really important to us Drupal was a global project and we wanted to work with people everywhere So and oftentimes your best recruiting tools is the team itself, right? Saying to your team help us create this culture help us find the people that that you want to work with for for instance There are a bunch of perks that come with being a distributed company and Excuse me, so distributed company comes with a different set of perks, right? There's no commute there can be a commuter if you want to if you want to commute you can Go to a co-working space or work with you know work with other or put get an office You have a personal work environment, which is nice. We actually saw pictures of that more time with the family flexible hours Generally a better work-life balance Again this comes from the management and works down management sets and enforces if you are working like crazy You can expect your team to Essentially follow suit. We try to be conscientious on the weekends and and use weekends for more inventing and hacking time And leisurely kinds of leisurely kinds of activities For recruitment when it comes to Things like vacation time and the such We actually set expiration dates on our vacation time because we found if we didn't that people don't take vacation Right, this is a lifestyle approach. You can take time off to go to the dentist You can you know go go to an exercise class in the middle of the day and then come back and work and people Wouldn't stop working they you know You have to help enforce the boundaries there and you got to have time to recharge the batteries And so we really try to enforce that But value values based hiring right talking about those kinds of those kinds of things and Hiring for the company you want to be not always the company that you are the the aspirational kind of hiring Is is really important for for the company culture? So what type of people thrive in a distributed company? Certainly folks coming from the open-source world You know they have experience in a community They have experience doing contributions and working as a team kind of being in that we we space It's really really important comfort with the social media, you know people that Like to broadcast tends to be tends to be a big win strong written and verbal communication skills Obviously, that's that's really important the Written and and spoken culture of distributed company. You don't have the body language, right? You need to depend on these tools more Hobbies having hobbies Sports family things that take you beyond the laptop really help with isolation Having having activities to do when things outside of of your day job Are really sustaining for that work life work life balance? So those are the kind of the things that that we look for Definitely the the open-source contributions are big because you can dive in I mean and that is that is your resume You can see the conversations that people are having and use that as a good reference point retention The weird word So the big thing the big thing about this is that communication has to be a level playing field Everybody has to use it. That's the problem with the physical companies and the the virtual employees Is there's different communication tools being used if you have a level playing field and communication? You're naturally going to have everybody tapped into what's going on And they're going to have their finger on the pulse of of your organization This is lullabot seventh year as a company and we've had We're now at 35 people and we've had five people leave lullabot over the course of seven years I think that's because the job can go with you in a lot of ways if you move or if something comes up and you need to Be at home more a virtual company a distributed company can support those types of transitions in the last seven years I lived in Iowa Oregon Utah and now Rhode Island and it's it's nice to be able to take your job with you Keep giving back be able to say yes to the Austin projects always have room for more gratitude deliberate communication I'll talk I'll talk more about that Like attracts like you know be look for the look for the people and support and continue to Give people the kinds of things that they want to do and work on you know check in often About is there anything you're doing that we don't know about yet? And what can we be doing to support you more? That's what I Excuse me. That's what I mean by Deliberate communication is you can't it's not enough just to walk by somebody's cubicle and pat them on the back And say how they're doing you actually have to pick up the phone And make a concerted effort to have a conversation with them and ask those kinds of questions So sometimes the the clients have different views on distributed companies It can be a tough sell it used to be a really tough sell and we would say you know our work lives in the cloud And so do we that some gotten a little bit corny or over the years, so we say it less but You know one thing to understand is that corporate cultures usually come from and Failed experiment experiments with telecommuting or Or You know telecommuting happened when there wasn't technology there to really support it right Those these tools for collaboration are constantly changing and they've only gotten better And I think it's important to empathize that a physical company has different ways of getting work done And there will be some give-and-take in the relationship. So for instance Kick off a project on site Get together maybe even get together for the for the milestones and work together for a week or two build up that trust build up that collaboration and Then say hey, you know We've got some tools here that I think would be really helpful for this project Maybe you spin off your own IRC channel for that particular team with a client and try to do a little bit of cross-pollination On the tools to have a really successful project So I think that looks like it looks like a real company to me The the remaining myths are a lot about communication Communication in A distributed company tends to be open in nature. It tends to be proactive deliberate and emotional, what do I mean by some of those things so Explicit communication You know Management isn't a natural role to me. I don't feel like I was born to be a manager in the same way that Perhaps one doesn't feel ready to be a mother or father that there's some learned skills that go along with it However, I think anybody that has kids also tends to be really good managers. There's some relationships there and You need to teach these things you need to to You know have again culture is a byproduct of consistent behavior And so outlining what you want those behaviors to be either in a handbook or just through repeated patterns is really really important Be deliberate say what you need ask for help be your own model for accountability if you mess up say you mess up own it and let people know that it's okay to own those mistakes and On the emotional side You know we encourage venting. We don't always know How people feel or or what's going on? But sometimes on our calls will hear some frustration or they're down And what we'll do is well, you know our managers or us will give them a call and say hey What's going on? It sounds like you're having sounds like you're having a tough day and Giving room to vent because if they don't vent now Is it gonna are they gonna vent with a client? Are they gonna become more discouraged and isolate themselves from the group? You know staying on top of those things and being aware of the cues the the things to listen for the Phrases to be aware of is is really important in the distributed company when you don't have those otherwise Non-verbal tools available to you Also support passion support disagreement You know those are all healthy things You know a lot of people have a fear of conflict. I myself do but I'm learning to embrace it more You know we spend time Talking about non-violent communication techniques and we realize that we're all trying to get to the same goal And creating the freedom to do that certainly all the collaboration tools out there make it a lot easier, right? Opening up a Google doc having 20 people contribute to it come up with a you know the next funny name for our product Can be really fun and rewarding and we really want to foster that and let people have an opinion and know that that we've heard them So let's look at some examples of communication overhead Communication is inefficient So one of the things that we've gone back and forth with is that we have two team calls a week the whole team The entire team It's like it's like having an all-hands-on-deck company meeting on Mondays and Fridays The only difference is that everybody everybody gets a gets a turn to say what they're working on We've done the math it's expensive. It's expensive to run but it's So rewarding to do on Monday to jump on the phone everybody gets one to two minutes to talk Yeah, we time it and And they say what their goals are for the week They say what they're working on and we give company updates and then we do the same thing on Friday How did your week go? What did you what did you accomplish? And it's kind of like this power hour of conversation where everybody gets to say what they're doing It's great. It creates alignment Everybody knows what each other is working on and I think these kinds of things are really important to stay tapped in Because you're not going to see everybody that ever everybody in the office each day So, you know this model might change. Is it inefficient? I don't think so as a sustainable probably not in this current form We've got some ideas on how to do it, but having a touch point For the whole organization. I think is really important for a distributed company We do weekly written management reports for all of these all these categories. It might be tedious I don't think it's a lot different from a physical company. I think It's great. It gives the Individuals time to reflect on how their department or how their department or area did and then it gives us time To read them and then offer some thoughtful feedback and support for the week to come And I think I think I've said this but to be explicit the secret advantage I feel of an entirely distributed company is that everyone has to use the same tools to communicate I Have a little typo there, but I apologize for that So it's a powerful concept right to be able to reach into your pocket pull out your phone and Use a tool like Yammer and know exactly what people are doing where they're going how they communicate the funny thing is is things like that actually come in handy for The physical being together in the same area to so Yammer has this feature where it can send SMS messages to A group so we use it here Everybody gets a text message because most of the team is here and we could say you know We're going out to dinner here. This is the person that's manning the booth right now So it has some some really nice adjacent effects to Unifying on the communication tools The interesting thing is is that you use the same tools to communicate but you can also have Rather than broadcasting you can also have private conversations a little bit easier too So you can ping someone an IRC you can you can call them on the phone and not everybody's in the office Watching watching who walks into the to the room with the boss and gets the door and has the door closed to have a private Conversation they everybody starts to wonder what's going on and and all that sort of stuff So I think there's you know, it works kind of both ways. You have less Less politics in the office as well So is it inefficient? I don't think so. There's there's a you know It's it's different. It's less spoken and it's more it's more written kind of communication It's more of a documentation culture But I think there is a kind of cadence To a distributed company again that social network concept of everybody's going in the same direction Once you get the communication tools figured out you know, I It's not inefficient But I didn't know if we could scale it past 10 people I didn't know if we could scale it past 20 people I didn't know if we could scale it past 30 people. The tools have changed a little bit. We're using more video We're using more micro blogging rather than internets, but Definitely see the see the rewards there Yep, so the top five virtual company myths no teamwork And Yeah, these are some of the communication tools that we use. I'm not going to go into detail for all of them but None of them should look too unfamiliar to this crowd in particular Etherpad like I said is a Google Doc light kind of thing We use that for more quickly brainstorming and we use Google Docs for more formatting kinds of things I will talk about a couple of these in particular to highlight the team aspect IRC it's the office the water cooler and all Share the funny YouTube videos Reach out to people during the day if you're an IRC that means that you're at work. That means you're available To have a conversation. It's it's no frills, right? It's low-key Unlike Skype. It's private if you do Skype chat Your friends can ping you at any time and this is reserved more just for the office just for getting getting your work done The ping-pong culture means more flow, right? Someone says hey, are you available? You can say yes. I am no I'm not It's more uninterrupted time to get work done and and we really like that Sometimes you know like any other company people get overbooked And you know, we try to monitor that we try to regulate that But having those uninterrupted times to get work done or to collaborate with your with your team I think is much more easily accomplished in a in a distributed company and IRC is great I mean the reward is seeing everybody work to jump into the room and say holy crap. There's there's the whole office On-site You know, it's I don't know if I call it a tool But it's really important to get together sometimes just to get together to do meet-ups of smaller groups and smaller departments Or to do larger company retreats where you just get time to chill out and relax with each other We also Because we don't see each other All the time we do funny things like when we're setting up the booth For Drupal con we run around with funny capes and masks just because we can So other tools again a lot of these are familiar dropbox is our file sharing trip It's for for traveling. We use Drupal eyes me a lot for onboarding New people that aren't familiar with Drupal. So that's a good way to get them up to speed We have a tech stipend. So rather than buying everybody's equipment. We just give We actually We give people a credit card Or more like a debit card and put a monthly stipend on there for people to buy and save up their equipment For laptop purchases and that sort of stuff We don't have any interest in owning their equipment and everybody has different preferences on the types of tools and technologies and Applications that they want to buy to get the work done. We use let's freckle for Hourly saying what you're working on and using that to build back time for clients when we work on hourly projects We have what we call the lullabot field guide, which is I think nowadays We just wrap up. It's about a 75 page manual mostly talking about communication how to email How to use IRC? What to what you know how to get into the flow of conversations and collaborations and that sort of stuff Lock a file lock a fi is for secure file transfers and turbo bridge is our conference line system So we have 10 conference lines that we use for all sorts of different things Internal private conference lines and then external client facing conference lines that we use So yeah, there's a lot of teamwork going on lonely job. Yeah It can be it's not for everyone if if you're coming from and spend a lot of time in the cubicle lifestyle It is it is a difficult adjustment and we we try really hard to Support and help and and mentor new people as they as they come on bar come aboard It's easy to burn out or fall into a black hole when you're when you're left on your own for too long For me, I find travel helps with that and getting together with a team I think this is where the social network aspect of a company comes in handy. You have peer support You have we encourage the team to be stewards of good communication and to reach out to people Again, that's what most of our handbook is dedicated to To combat loneliness One of the things one of the things that we do from a culture perspective is we say if a tree falls in the Forest and nobody's around to hear it, you know, did it did it happen? Meaning we need to know we we need to we embrace proactive communication because that's that's vital to the organization We don't have the other nonverbal cues that physical companies would otherwise have Co-working is good Sometimes we will we will work together just for the sake of working together because it's been a while Working from a coffee shop fly or drive to go visit another team member go for a run go do something else switch up the gears I Think I think in some in some instances. You'll hit extremes. I know that I oscillate back and forth a little bit Sometimes I'll work too much or too little because I don't know what I should be doing And so that's that's a form of Isolation or I don't know where to start or begin because I'm overwhelmed and Taking a step back sinking up with other people And saying hey, I need a little bit of direction or just even Finding some time or some ways to get together can really help clarify things And again that social background, you know having Something else beyond work, you know hobbies Yes, what's that? Ten minutes to go. Thank you. That's what my clock says to you. Thanks So let me let me write that up sometimes it can be lonely We've talked we've talked about is it sustainable. I don't know. I think we have a way to go automatic 150 distributed employees minus QL now Oracle 450 distributed employees There's some really good presentations out there on the net from the minus QL folks about how they run their virtual organization It's very very much the same I think Sustainable I'm reminded of this quote by Eric Reese In his book lessons learned he says values are the foot you leave on the floor when you pivot How will we know when it's no longer sustainable when we can no longer leave our foot on the floor? That's the only unit of measure that I that I have for that. I'm really excited to cross that bridge though and get to that point So at least in a physical company Oops Let's see Yeah, yeah, so I not a real so the myth so not a real company. I think that's a myth Communication is inefficient. I think that's a myth. No teamwork. I think that's the only job sometimes it can be Sustainable maybe So at least you don't have to worry about in a distributed company someone eating your lunch your car being ding the parking lot awkward bathroom moments However, I will say It's still possible to have awkward bathroom moments. Remember the mute button on your phone But as a distributed company you may not be able to get help on a project without asking for it you may Not be able to meet in person every every day with your team or not always have the gumption to be self-driven So I want to tie this back into the beginning. This is my last slide My first experience a distributed team And healthy social network was Drupal. I came in Dries was warm friendly inviting as well as the other 30 people working on the project at the time That really made me feel welcome and I felt welcomed in the community since 2003 so that was The tipping point that was the point for saying, you know something like a distributed company is possible it can be achieved so Let's continue to make Drupal open And accessible way beyond the source code. Let's do it for the people too It's it's how great things happen Thanks Anybody have any questions? Yep, and use the microphone there. They tell me it's being recorded So what about the scheduling planning and setting and meeting customers expectations? Do you find some specifics there setting planning meeting? We've tried a couple things the The handiest thing we've used is Google Calendar Google for business. I Don't want to be an advertisement for Google, but they've got some good things going on And we allow read-only access to everybody's work calendar So we can see and collaborate that way for each of our ten conference lines We have corresponding calendars. We have a conference call calendar that people book time and reserve time So everybody learns to check that beforehand For outbound Scheduling kinds of things we've used Tungal Tungal dot me To try and connect and collaborate because there's a lot of emails that go back and forth Can you make it this time? Can you make it this time? No, I can't but I can do it the next And so we we tend to outsource that if you will to Tungal so that everybody can go and see who's available when Comes in pretty handy for that project scheduling So in terms of Just just the fact that you know when you're I've done a lot of managing of distributed groups and managing people's Time and commitments and then setting customers expectations and meeting those expectations Bring some specific challenges of worrying how you guys approach it. Yep, definitely So in terms of project scheduling management management all of that again It's tapping into the social network aspect of your company being visible remaining visible learning to Virtually raise your hand when you need help Knowing that if you know a good interview question is if you spend you know say you've spent three days on this bug That you can't resolve what do you do right and say well I just I start kicking the wall and then I Google it and then you know It's like no you ask for help and to have that be embedded in your culture helps keep the project on track So that's one of the one of the ways Yeah, in the In the early stages of of starting lullaby, how did you overcome the Stigma from clients thinking that you weren't a real company and how did you? Obviously you guys ended up getting offices So that was obviously something that you tried to do to help alleviate that but before you got offices What did you do as far as meeting with clients and you know what were you some of your answers or responses? Yeah, yeah, um, yeah, the offices came about because we thought wouldn't it be fun to have a yoga studio So it's kind of less less about the clients But yeah, we did we did hit that hit that obstacle and we found that Taking the first step taking the first initiative to actually go out and meet them Rather than sort of waiting for that conversation to happen kind of being proactive about it showed okay These are real people doing real things in any time that we did an Education event a workshop or we were gonna go to a conference or we were gonna do our do our conference We would invite the clients we would invite them out to kind of to meet everybody to see everybody So anytime we had a group kind of thing if we could bring clients into it one way or another it showed Hey, look, we're real people getting real things done. The other thing that we would do Is at some point you you reach a point where you can say you know Don't take our word for it. Talk to let me give you the name of of the the last project that we did the person that we Worked for and talk to them and see if he felt You know see see what their experience was and so you know often having your other clients be spokespeople People for you can go a long ways to alleviate the the uncomfortableness You had mentioned a field guide that was a 75 page manual Do you have any tips or any books that you could recommend for a company? That's doing that my company is right now going through that through a results only work environment And we have several people who have given us some insight, but do you have any? Yeah? That's a great question. So we have a lullabot book club again It's just a group on Yammer that everybody says hey, I read this book and it's kind of awesome There's there's a number of books. There's a there's a book called small giants, which is by I think Bo Burlingham Earl Burlingham, Bobby Bobby B. Somebody Burlingham and it's talking about how companies choose to Be great instead of good and what that difference is so it's sort of a cultural alignment But I think is really good for Distributed companies remote companies. We're in the in lullabot right now. We're reading a book called tribal leadership Which is really an interesting one about? I Again moving from that eye space to the we space and breaking having little tribes into the larger groups That's a good one another one that I fit that I just read was the five dysfunctions of a team and it kind of reads like a story and it talks about fear of conflict and communication and Building a culture of openness and trust in the organization. It's an instant story form It doesn't make for a very good audio book if you're into that, but it's a better It's a better book to read But that's a that's a good one too Which one did I just say the five dysfunctions of a team? Hey Matt Quick question. Do you hire? more junior developers and if so, how do you? Integrate them into distributed culture. Yeah Junior developers and and how do you how do you bring them on the the onboarding process is really important in a distributed company? Imagine someone coming in in a distributed company there they get up in the morning They know they're gonna go work for you know for your organization They're taking a shower they're getting dressed and they go to their computer. They sit there You know they open their laptop. They sit down and go Now what now what the hell do I do? So we try to use the buddy system, so we give we give Each new person a buddy in this case. They're they're distributed. They're in another location Sometimes we come on site, so we've been toying around with the idea that if we hire two or three You know junior developers for instance that we would fly them all to a Central location and spend time and work with them for a week You know we have this office space that we really only use for meet-ups or for bringing the team in and doing some work together But but that's good You know having resources like Drupalize me kind of helps with that but definitely Orienting them on the first day and giving them someone to talk to that's not their boss. That is their you know side-by-side Person that they'll they can work along with is really empowering for them to get them what they need But there's a lot of reading that first day that they handbook and knowing what's expected of them that sort of stuff Your opinion has your innovative use of social networking and global team building Diminish the need for traditional project management function Or eliminated that the need for that function Yeah, so what's the role of traditional project management in a distributed company and distributed teams? That's that's a really good question I don't know if I have a definitive answer for that So there's a lot of different types of project management and we've seen different types in in different organizations You know, there's there's project management that is Is more like cat herding and pushing things along and then there's you know again the role of of management, I think in a distributed company is to motivate to empower to facilitate to make sure that projects are flowing unstuck and I think it more becomes that and Acting, you know, we find project management as a role to interface with the client as a role to move things along We have a we usually do a daily 15-minute call that we invite the client to to say what are you working on? Are you stuck? What do you what do you need to move forward? And I think the traditional project management is more about filing reports and in this case I don't I mean to sound I don't mean to overstate it But the reports kind of file themselves, you know You've already created that culture where everybody is documenting writing sharing bubbling up Someone's taking notes on each of the scrum calls the clients are already on there And it just becomes less about that and more about facilitating the actual work I think this follows up on that on that question. This yeah, this is the last question Do you use any sort of issue tracking or bug tracking systems? Yeah, we use a lot. I don't know what the Sally, what's our favorite one these days? Assembler all right assembler There's we use a whole bunch and it's sometimes it's what the client prefers and we have our preferences too But we've used unfuddle for a number of years and where it looks like all the kids are on the assemble bandwagon these days Thanks everybody