 Now, if you think you want to work a couple of days from home, let's talk about what support do you need. Do we need to have better tools, do we need to have better work-from-home setups, do we need better product specifications, what else you need for us to make that change. So we are definitely more open towards having more flexibility both in working from office or also working hours, right? The working hours can also be non-linear. They can split their days to overlap with their colleagues and also overlap with some customers. Welcome to the Universal Remote Webcast from GetLab, where we tackle the real challenges as the hard questions, but of course, try not to take ourselves too seriously. I'm Darren, head of remote at GetLab. I've worked my entire career remotely and with this webcast, we want to share some of the best practices that we've learned at GetLab, but also bring in some really interesting people from around the world to share their perspectives. And today I have an amazing guest, Sunil, the co-founder and CEO at CyanEasy. He and I go way back. We've worked together a long time and for historical context, we're recording this in April of 2020 in the midst of a global pandemic. And Sunil, like many other leaders, has had to look to remote for business continuity and that has created new opportunities and new challenges. And I wanted to invite him on the webcast to talk about some of those for other leaders and founders that are maybe going through something similar. Hopefully he can shed some light on that. So first off, Sunil, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks Darren. Thanks for having us. So let's just dive right in. Was your team remote in any way prior to the COVID-19 pandemic? So before COVID-19, we actually had a distributor set up. We have four locations, one in Bangalore and Chandigarh in India and then we have a HQ office in Dallas and we have a few people working in Ukraine. So it was sort of a distributor set up and of course it was remote friendly because there was a lot of interaction, communication and collaboration between different teams in these different countries or cities. Got it. So that's a quintessential hybrid remote environment where you have multiple headquarters and so even if everyone goes into the office, the different locations are remote to each other. Did you actually have any employees that worked full-time from home or did you support any kind of workplace flexibility where even if they had a seat in an office, sometimes they would work outside of it? Sure. In terms of full-time working remote, I would say that's just me and that's because I am based in Mexico City and other people like people in Dallas, people in Chandigarh in India and some people in Bangalore, they would have the option of working from home once or twice a week or whenever they feel there is a need for that. And of course we have another remote team in Ukraine which does support for us that they are working from their offices there. So it's very interesting you mentioned that because one of the things I advise people that are trying to transition to remote is to get the leadership team out of the office first. Tider the leadership team is tied to the office. It seems that it's more difficult for a company to adopt remote first practices and actually be amenable to remote and what I like to say is be remote fluent. But you said you are already remote and so that inevitably helps your team adapt to remote. I'm curious if anything changed after COVID-19. I mean, are people now fully work from home in their respective regions? Did you have to implement any new tools or processes or orientations? So let me just give a little bit of context on why I am remote full time for the last couple of years. So when I was building the company and it was growing and our customers were expanding, it was like until 2017 I was in India along with my team but in 2017 I decided to move back to US so I could focus more on building a sales, customer success and the partnership and BD operations here. So it was by necessity that I had to go completely and I had to come back to US then for personal reasons I decided to along with my family move to Mexico City to stay here. So it was all based on the necessity, it was not like a conscious leadership choice that leadership will go fully remote. Anyway, you know the situation made me figure out and put processes and frameworks so that I can work with my own direct reports which are essentially people at a leadership level and they are distributed in Dallas, Bangalore and Chandigarh. So it kind of automatically happened that for me to be more productive and I guess efficient I had to put together these processes. But now with everyone working from home and it's not remote friendly, it's more about remote first before we used to be hybrid remote, remote friendly but now everybody has adjusted and made those changes to work in a remote first work from home setup. This is interesting, talk to me about some of the processes that you had in place because if you're in Mexico City and you have people in different continents, obviously there's going to be some massive time zone gaps there. It sounds to me like you're going to have to figure out how to work asynchronously. There's no way to get all of those people on synchronous calls day after day. So talk me through what that looked like before and how that has helped you now that your team is all remote. Yeah, so a few years ago we started basically very conscious efforts to put together a company guide and the company guide essentially or the handbook let's say it consists of now what are our communication styles and communication etiquette and communication principles. What are some of the core leadership principles and values that we want everybody in the company to strive for and those are around essentially problem solving creatively, high quality, faster decision making. Also how do we collaborate, how do we communicate, let's say product specifications or design briefs or marketing briefs also standard operating procedures for how do we run our sales team, how do we run our success team, how do we run our support team. So all of that started getting documented really well and we would always make it part of our onboarding process both for new employees and also as a training process for existing employees so that they're not surprised so they're not at a loss if ever we become fully asynchronous or remote first right. And those things have really helped in terms of when we made this adjustment we had to make certain tweaks or we have to overemphasize on certain aspects like more communication, more transparency, more flexibility is needed but overall it was not a big big affair for us to get existed to. Yeah, because you had things documented the shift was not as jarring as it was to some is what I'm hearing. Yes. I've seen some companies that if there's no documentation in place going from a co-located or even a hybrid remote environment into an all remote environment is very disorienting, very jarring because you're trying to accomplish several things at once. You're trying to keep your business going, establish stabilization and business continuity while simultaneously writing and creating all of the process and documentation that you should have done from the beginning. Was your intentionality and the conscious decision on documenting that process? Was that out of necessity because you are remote or was it something you thought this will help us work more efficiently or was it a combination of both? I would say it's primarily the latter which is you know we would want you know the company can only scale when it knows about how do we onboard new people faster right whether we are hiring on you know on the product side, design side or support side and different functions so they all have different nuances to what those operating processes or procedures are like and also for historical reasons right the company is close to 10 years old now, 9 or 10 years old so we need to be able to go back and check hey why did we make a certain decision why are we doing it like this is it the status quo just because somebody said it or we tried many things and we arrived at this as the best fit at this point but now things have changed a lot more people have joined you know we have more offices around the world so maybe we need to change that so it's just going going back for reference really helps it becomes a knowledge base internally now that people can always refer back to. Is this something that you picked up in prior organizations? The thing that I'm trying to figure out is what makes someone naturally inquisitive and naturally have a natural inclination to document because GitLab is very similar in that we're around 9 or 10 years old and people that joined the company now we're at over 1200 people in more than 65 countries we benefit from things that were written down from month one and month two. But how do you have that foresight to think about it early on so that it allows you to scale as you said? Any one of this could be because of the way I process information you I like to see things written down so you can because when you're writing then it shows that you have a clear thought process and it also creates more accountability and somebody else can always look back and say okay this is how things should be done or this is what people agreed upon so if there is some sort of a miscommunication or misunderstanding because you know not everybody is a great communicator verbally and also sometimes people forget things you know we do so many projects we talk to so many people so this helps and I think this is now myself and some of my co-leadership team who are also great communicators we tend to rely on a lot more written forms of work-related communication than verbal so it could be I think that's probably the the reason of course the second reason is few years ago when I when I became remote I had to figure out how do I synchronously get updates and you know get make decisions and get more context. It's a key point to reiterate often times I'll hear people say writing things down putting a focus on a document on documentation it feels like it slows me down it feels like it's less efficient but my point back to them is writing things down makes you more efficient longer term because you plug a lot of the knowledge leaks and the knowledge gaps that would inevitably pop up because people are human and if we only verbalize things to each other and we don't have a document in any way over time you'll forget some of that it makes it really difficult to loot people in midstream it's really difficult for new hires to get fully up to speed because yeah it's just hand me down information which inevitably erodes over time or you have to keep repeating it you have to again get on a call and you know again you have to remember what you discussed you might have forgotten but just handing over or forwarding a google doc or an email communication it's very very helpful. What's interesting about this is the things you're talking about would help a company regardless of their structure whether you're an all remote company a hybrid remote company or even a co-located company if you have meetings where you document things even if you're all in the same room you're going to have less knowledge leaks going forward and that's something that i've tried to share with people is we're talking about remote now a lot because tens of millions of people are suddenly remote but a lot of these practices will help you no matter what stage your company is in and speaking of that i'm just curious if this has influenced your thoughts on workplace flexibility going forward in any in one way or the other is it the kind of thing that hey if we can make this work all remote maybe we don't send some of our team back to the office or maybe we find out that we actually love having our our teams in the office have you had time to sift through that yes it's a great question so in fact as the lockdowns are the lockdowns are being eased upon right and different cities and different countries right now since we have a big presence in Bangalore right now close to you know 40 people or so in one office we you know we you know we spoke internally with some of my senior leadership team and what we are realizing is that you know beyond the efficiency of documenting stuff and also having your you know different practice in the company around communication decision making and etc i think there's another aspect that we see that we are benefiting from and which is around i think most of our colleagues or employees are much happier because they are gaining a lot of the personal time back to themselves because you know there is less commute there is less stress there is there are less distractions at work and the second is in a day feel more focused and productive because there are less distractions you know they can kind of box themselves in in certain hours of the day and just make progress on their immediate objectives or goals right and the third is i think it has brought some sort of a urgency or importance to only work on things that really matter either for the customers or for each other or for the company right so we are spending less energy and time on stuff that seem urgent but not important or that seem urgent but they're still trivial so how can you eliminate some of the stuff so the point the point that i want to get at is i think we are going to become more remote friendly or at least give people the choice you know as a leadership team we will be we'll be more flexible now if you think you want to work a couple of days from from home let's talk about what support do you need no do we need to have better tools do we need to have better work from home setups do we need better um you know better product product specifications what else you need for us to make that change so we are definitely more open towards you know having more flexibility both in working from office or also working hours right the working hours can also be non-linear they can split their days to overlap with their colleagues and also overlap with some customers customer time jobs it's heartening to hear that it makes total sense for us but for those leaders who have been resistant to remote i really want to focus on what i'm hearing from you which is you're creating an atmosphere and a culture that is supportive of doing things differently of adopting a new way of working of looking at the opportunity and not not having a scarcity mindset and one thing that i found very interesting about what you just said is that your people are happier they're finding themselves as more productive they're enjoying that there's no commute and this is during a really tough time this is not an ideal time in the world and what i'm trying to to help people forecast is if you're appreciating the benefits of remote right now imagine what it will be 6 12 18 months from now when we the travel restrictions are lifted life returns to some degree of normalcy and a lot of this infrastructure that you're building now is like fully in place and and your team is more cohesive because of it what advice would you give to other founders or team leaders that are in a similar situation maybe if they aren't quite as remote fluent or they're running into obstacles or they're just having this battle internally on should we do this or should we not is there any advice you would give on helping people to think about this as being an unblocker and asking people for feedback and asking people for what tools they need to thrive as opposed to let's just figure out a way to get back to the office as quickly as possible yeah i think that's you know to be honest that's a difficult question because it also depends on the personality of personality or beliefs of either the leadership team or maybe the majority of the team right and sometimes it also depends upon the stage of the company now some people just inherently believe if you're a very very early stage and you just need to you know creatively brainstorm you need to you know you need to things are basically moving right a lot of things are moving so you don't want to be able to lose any sort of you know communication because of not being in the same space at the same time so so there are many angles to it but i think i can come back from my personal perspective here i feel that most likely if somebody does not want to go fully remote they can at least come into some sort of an hybrid remote environment right and when i say remote doesn't mean these people in a different city or a different country this means can we create more work from home flexibility you know can we even create you know you spend maybe four hours or six hours in the office but the rest is up to you you know where you want to spend that time right because you want to avoid peak traffic times or you want to go and play something that that you're really passionate about or you want to cater something towards your family that you really care about so i think hybrid remote is something what i would encourage every founder or entrepreneur to at least give it a try and of course the team has to feel comfortable some people want to just they like the social interaction so if you like the social interaction it does not have to happen every day but it can happen few days a week maybe right so how much of that hybrid remote that you know that boundary i think that each team or each company should decide yeah i think that's that will be my advice to the founders the other one i would really say is during these times we have realized that a lot of our employees are they have skill sets so they're expressing more interest to contribute to other areas because they're able to get so much work done in a lesser amount of time how do i contribute more because i'm enjoying the work maybe i maybe i write maybe i write i like blogging about something or i like to you know i like design so can i help the marketing team with some design stuff right and in the age of canva and you know and everybody can be a designer right and if you have creative ideas you can help marketing with you know putting coming with some visual assets and so forth so i think these are great time for founders to to encourage um those hidden talents or unseen talents that you would want your employees to kind of sign in right so yeah and and you know great time to figure out what's working in your culture and not working in your culture because you're not you know watching over soldiers or your employees anymore so accountability trust and um you know collaborative mindset all of those things will come across either they're working good or not working so you can work towards improving your culture maybe this is a great opportunity to to leverage love that sunio we say never waste a crisis we can't wish away the crisis all we can do is determine how we're going to respond to it it's it's super inspirational i hope tons of founders uh and leaders watch this and uh and take your advice speaking of inspiration i try to end each of these calls with one question so i'll ask you what is one good thing that you've seen or heard this week or this month okay so the actually we have seen a lot of good things over the last month unlike the macro climate where um a lot of industries a lot of employees are being impacted in a very negative manner um but because of the space we are in which is you know online document signing you know either from your mobile device or your web device i think we you know we have seen you know tremendous um optic in usage of our product and it's not just the usage bits about the use cases our customers are using it for right we have you know one simple story we just released a new feature on our product to to help small businesses sign and fill these ppp loan documents right that is under the sbs stimulus we released that because in 48 hours we conceptualized the idea and we released it and we've gotten tremendous traction from you know small business owners because they're at home that they don't have access to a printer or a fax machine but being able to quickly submit it some sign the form using our product right and submit to the lender of their bank and getting it approved you know we have seen like you know thank you for doing this job you know what we are doing and you know we're very very touching stories we have received um and in fact one story came from a customer in Dallas Dallas at a headquarters and we got a story from somebody in Dallas who who just you know was extremely thrilled to have um to have the chance to um get his loan process because sign easy helped him submit the loan document faster so I think you know there are plenty of stories like that but that is something which was really touching for all of us that's a wonderful story so now where can where can people learn more about you and sign easy so they can check out our website sign easy dot com or they can also go to a blog on sign easy dot com slash blog and they can you know see what we are doing how we are helping small businesses and our customers um doing this unprecedented and uncertain covid times and um yeah and follow our follow our journey over the last you know eight nine years and if they if they feel they need a two leg hours I would um you know suggest them give it a try that's awesome thank you so much Sunil it's good to see your face again thanks so much for joining me and for the audience we'll be sure to put all of those links in the show notes below and if you have any questions for us feel free to tweet us at get lab we'll try to work those into the next episode follow us on linkedin and twitter go to all remote dot info to download the remote playbook sign up for our newsletter and learn more about how get lab does we'll talk to you next time until then stay cozy be excellent to one another aloha and mahalo