 If we adopt remote work is no longer an option. This will always be a plan B, whether it be pandemic related, healthcare related, transportation, you know, or snow days, whatever it is. This is now permanently ingrained into the minds of our society that, well, I can just work from home today. So this, every business leader in the world cannot be thinking, well, if we implement remote work, like this is now part of our daily operations, we have to focus on how. How are we going to make this more efficient, more optimized, more universally accessible? How are we going to make this better in our organization and in our communities? Hey all, welcome to Universal Remote. This is a weekly webcast from GitLab talking all things remote. I'm Darren, head of remote here at GitLab, the world's largest all remote company. And this week we're talking about the socioeconomics of remote. I'm delighted to announce that Laurel Farr, the CEO and founder of Distribute Consulting is joining us this week. Laurel, thank you so much for joining us. Give the audience a bit of background on yourself as well as Distribute Consulting. Well, thank you for having me. This topic is near and dear to my heart. So I'm excited to nerd out with you on it. So I am the CEO of Distribute Consulting, which at this point is the world's only consulting firm that specializes exclusively in remote work. It was a very small kingdom a few months ago and now it's a very big kingdom. So we're very, very humbled and honored to be able to make so much impact in so many different ways in the marketing of remote work, the economic and government advisory of remote work as well as the change management and transformation of corporations. Yeah, it's huge. It is absolutely amazing to see the transformation. You and I have joked off camera that we were doing remote before. It was the hip thing to do. That sort of tongue-in-cheek. But seriously, I think the global embraces of remote has been accelerated by at least 10 years and I'm sure you're seeing this and feeling this and the insights of having lived remote prior to just a few months ago. And for historical context, we're recording this in May of 2020 is essential. A lot of businesses are in a completely uncharted territory and having that advice from years past and how we got to where we are and what those best practices are is remarkable. So for anyone watching that's in a limbo or transition type of situation, be sure to reach out to Laura and distribute consulting. She is a treasure trove of information. And so lots of assets there. So I wanna jump into the questions. You've obviously spent a lot of your career and life writing and opining on remote. And I wanted to dig in a little bit on the four main economic benefits of workplace flexibility. I don't know if a lot of people really take time to dig into that and unpack it. A lot of people see remote kind of at the surface level but there's really a lot underneath. So I'd love to hear your insights on that. Absolutely, this is something that I think deserves so much more attention because we do get so hyper focused on the personal benefits, right? Like we don't have to wake up early and we don't have to commute and we can wear sweatpants and that's all great but I'm always disappointed when the media focuses on that because there is profound economic impact just of our society, of our lifestyles, of our dynamics as international citizens that can be affected by this conversation. So I think the number one thing that everybody needs to understand is how much this impacts economic development. So this is how businesses are able to grow. This is how cities are able to grow. This is just everything about the movement of money through our economies. And that has historically been a very traditional process of cities recruiting businesses to a certain location based on the industry that their natural resources support and then that city becomes very dependent on those industry specific businesses and then that is how a local economy survives. And that's also what makes the local economy so fragile because if those factories close, we've seen this all through Midwest America, right? The Rust Belt, if a factory closes, the city dies. And so a really exciting thing that we're doing is really distributing opportunity outside of traditionally urban areas and diversifying wealth and opportunity. So reducing that urban world divide and bringing jobs and industries directly to a city that needs it. And that has immediate impact. Whereas the traditional economic development cycle takes years and years and years. This is a matter of days or months until new diversified tax revenue is generated. So economic development is number one. Number two, I would think would be environmental sustainability. And we've seen this post COVID that so many people are posting things on Twitter like I've never been able to see the mountain range that I live next to until now. Because when we have remote work at scale, transportation and traffic is reduced so drastically that we have less congestion, less air pollution. And therefore we have cleaner air, cleaner water, lower carbon footprints of the businesses as well as the individuals. I mean, just incredible, incredible, exciting benefits there. But then we get into the weeds a little bit of not directly thinking about environmental sustainability and economic development, but we also see diversity and inclusion. We see massive, massive opportunities for minorities, whether that be age or gender or sexual orientation or even height. There are very traditional discriminatory factors that happen in offices and those don't happen as much in virtual environments because everybody's equal. I mean, your head is the same size as my head right now. And that, you know, it seems ridiculous and frivolous, but it's true. Like just think of what that does for equal voice in the equal context. So yeah, diversity and inclusion. And then also the fourth point, and I'm aware that I'm rambling so much, but you get me started and I can't stop. This is great. This is why you're here. Yeah. But the last one I think is just accessibility in general. And again, not to make this episode so specific to a certain time period, but we saw this massively in during the coronavirus turmoil is healthcare accessibility is one of the greatest crises of our entire world internationally. And people don't have access to the healthcare that they need, whether that be geographic proximity or there are financial barriers, but just people don't have access to that healthcare. And so with the rise of telehealth and telemedicine, all of a sudden you can have access to the greatest healthcare that is available in your country or even on your continent or even in the world. And you can have access to that in a matter of minutes. So it makes healthcare and just public rights so much more accessible and standardized throughout the world. So I could go on and on about 14 of the 17 United Nations sustainability initiatives are all impacted by remote work. And so this is a very massive conversation, but we'll stop there for now. That's huge. And you're right. We do follow-up episodes on each of those four and talk for hours. I think the key theme through all of that is options. And it remote enables options that didn't exist before. Instead of having to choose between a few urban centers of the world, basically the best of worst solutions, you're able to port your job to wherever you need to be. Maybe that's in a specific midsize or small town that has health services relevant to a specific condition that you have. Instead of having to choose somewhere else and kind of make do with what's there, you're able to actually choose where you live based on things a lot more important than your vocation to be completely frank. And for cities, I spoke recently with someone who helped with Vermont's initiative and Tulsa Remote. This is massive because instead of having to figure out what pocket of real estate they're gonna carve out for a skyscraper to try to bring economic development in, you think about things that matter to lifestyle. What kind of hospital should we have? We need grocery stores within walking distance of downtown. And then just invite people to come live in your amazing town and bring the job with them. And as their career evolves over time, you wanna build a compelling place so that they don't actually have to leave town. That is how you build economic sustainability. And I think that it's so empowering and it's so incredible and it's happened so fast. I think the heads are still spinning for people that are in municipality development because that's just, it has not been possible for so long and now suddenly it is. And I think that's encouraging. I think that we're gonna see people rewire how they think about building towns going forward. Speaking of, I wanna talk a bit about change management and what the adoption of remote work is gonna look like. Maybe look ahead six or 12 months from now. So maybe through the rest of 2020, early 2021. And then maybe a bit further. What's it gonna look like when people truly start embracing the conversion from physical to virtual in the long term? Yeah, well the long term conversation is very, very different than the short term. And so I'm glad that you and I are talking about this because we both have the experience that shows that this conversation about remote work is not going to be all sunshine and rainbows for very much longer. And there's been a very big rise of evangelism of remote work as the world was forced to start working from home with shelter in place initiatives and all of a sudden there was just this surge of opportunism that everyone was oh, I'm an expert and oh, I've been working from home for all this time and everybody was anxious to be an advocate. However, the tune is going to change and we know as operations managers that the allowance of remote work is very, very different than the true adoption and integration of remote work. The sustainability conversation is completely, completely different. Even the famous retraction stories of IBM and Yahoo, they were advocates in the beginning and they said, yeah, this is fantastic and look at all of these benefits. And that's the phase of change management that we're in right now as a world. We're in the honeymoon period. And so very soon in about three to six to 12 months is where companies are going to start feeling those pain points of sustainability and they're going to start saying this isn't working as well as we thought and something's going wrong and I don't know if this is gonna be as easy as we thought we should just go back to the office. But the problem with that is that it's going to coincide exactly with the second wave of coronavirus and if we don't have larger immunization options in place by that time, which it looks like it is not going to be the case, then we're going to have to shelter in place again and so businesses are going to be forced to go back to shelter in place, but this time under less happy circumstances and the novelty has worn off. So yeah, we're going to see the tone of the media coverage of remote work change pretty significantly in the past, in the next few months, that there will be a lot of nacing, a lot of finger pointing and a lot of problems of our economy start to be blamed on remote work. And so the true advocates I think at that point are going to be the ones that rise to the top and are willing to continue to defend remote work even amidst that negative coverage. And I think what's really important here is to focus on the reality that change is never easy. If you were around in the early 1900s when the assembly line came in, I'm sure there was quite a bit of disruption from manufacturing things this way versus this way. I highly doubt it was just inserted on one day and then the next day you're rocking a roll and no one's going to complain or want to go back or anything like that. But I think the other element here is going remote helps businesses to de-risk themselves and to be more isolated from future crises. And so instead of rushing back to the office, you might want to consider what elements do we need to put in place where we would not have to go back to the office if and when that situation were to happen. So I want to ask you to touch on that. What makes a remote company different? What elements of their workflows are fundamentally different from co-located spaces and want to couch that by saying when I have consulted and offered advice to companies, what I end up telling them is not something that's exclusive to remote. These are workflows that work really well and are necessary for remote teams. But turns out they also make hybrid teams and co-located teams more efficient and cohesive as well. I just wanted to couch that because it's worth pointing out to remotely or to newly remote leaders that these things aren't, learn it now and then dispose of it in six months. These will truly impact your operational strategy and performance going forward. Exactly. And I'd love that you brought up the words of if and how because that is the big conversation change that if we adopt remote work is no longer an option. This will always be a plan B, whether it be pandemic related, healthcare related, transportation, you know, or snow days, whatever it is. This is now permanently ingrained into the minds of our society that, well, I can just work from home today. So every business leader in the world cannot be thinking, well, if we implement remote work, like this is now part of our daily operations, we have to focus on how. How are we going to make this more efficient, more optimized, more universally accessible? How are we going to make this better in our organization and in our communities? You know, the primary barrier to adoption with remote work and the biggest block in the change management process is the mindset of management. This is the lingering obstacle because everything else that we do in operations, our equipment, our processes, our products have all been converted to virtual. However, our management styles are still physical. We're still very sensory, you know, and this is a byproduct of the industrial revolution. This is not anybody's fault, it's not bad. It's just how business has been operated for the last 200 years, like it's okay. But we do need to update it. And that's the last, usually the last puzzle piece that needs to be converted over to virtual. So the more that we can focus on that, the leadership mindset, the remote work policies, I'm really creating a top down change management process. The smoother it's going to go. So I really encourage all companies to invest in executive education and coaching as well as leadership training, as well as workforce training. I'm really helping everybody to understand what this new management methodology needs to look like in a virtual capacity. What is the role that everybody needs to play in order to make this successful? Because it's very, very heavy on self-management. The manager empowering workers to be better self-managers and the workers stepping up to the plate and increasing their scope of responsibility to include self-management. And that's a big gap for a lot of companies. And so the more that we can focus on that and address that gap and resolve it, the smoother that the change management process will go. And for someone that's worked across the spectrum of remote for the past 10 plus years, one thing that I've noticed is that we have needed this for a very long time. This is not a new thing. It's just that COVID is exposing something that we should have been addressing for a long time, but weren't. And what I mean by that is, remote work will very soon just be called work because practically speaking, most multinational companies have been working remotely for years. If you've ever been on an airplane and you've added a slide to a presentation deck, you've worked remotely. If you've ever been in a hotel room in a conference center while the rest of your team was on site, you've worked remotely. Even in university, if you've moved a project forward in your dorm room while the rest of your cohorts were on campus, you've worked remotely. And for companies that have multiple headquarters that are in different time zones, they're definitely remote to each other. So none of these things are new elements. They're just becoming more urgent immediately. And it's a difficult combination because you have leaders that need to stabilize and build in business continuity at the same time as learning how to fundamentally manage a team differently when they can't guarantee that everyone will be in the office day after day. So it's an interesting mix, but I do think long-term, this forcing function will make better managers. And it'll be a great litmus test of the companies that really invest in this versus those that bury their heads in the sand, so speak and just kind of pretend and hope that we can go back to the office full-time. Absolutely. Yeah, all of those elements that you just mentioned, like you said, remote work, it's just work. So management, it's just good management. I mean, there's never going to be a scenario in which the elements of remote work or the elements that make remote work unique, like asynchronous communication and results-based tracking and employee empowerment, like there's never gonna be a scenario in which those are not going to benefit a business, right? Like it doesn't matter if you're in the office or if you're virtual, those are just part of the future of work and how business is managed in our modern contemporary era. Therefore, it's just upskilling. So it really doesn't matter where our people are located, we need to just focus more on how we are creating healthy culture, healthy engagements, career development. Again, the more that we focus on how, the less that all of the other elements, like if or where, the less that those matter. It's such a great point and you mentioned in that last phrase the word healthy and I've seen a lot of leaders get so fixated and focused right now in just getting the nuts and bolts, the X and O's correct, that they lose sight of the humanization of this, which is we're all working with people that are in their respective homes and we shouldn't lose sight of that. And we're in a situation now where many people have been thrust into remote work, they didn't have transitionary time, which is really difficult. What are the tips that you would share in terms of just zooming out and enjoying the benefits of working remotely or enabling people to use their imagination to restructure their day or really think about what their peak productivity hours are or consider a non-linear work day to integrate family more into work. And a lot of people are just stuck in trying to copy the office environment, paste it virtually, maintaining the same schedules. And for some people that routine can be helpful but what is zooming out and focusing on the advantages and prioritizing mental health? What does that look like to you? Yeah, you know, like we said, this is employee empowerment at its finest and the reason that a lot of people are feeling uncomfortable is because unfortunately our office environments and just how business has scaled over time has really created a cycle of dependency and of routine and habits. So we drive to the office, we all wear the same thing. We, you know, we sit down, we do our work and we come home. We are very, very, very ingrained on the subconscious level to just do what we are told and to do the same thing over and over. And so that's why it's feeling a bit uncomfortable is all of a sudden we have this freedom and this empowerment to say, what do you want your environment to look like? What do you want your day to look like? What styles work best for you? And all of a sudden we have this empowerment and this freedom of choice that we haven't had for quite a while. And so it's an uncomfortable transition for a lot of people. However, the more that we can stop the language of we're being forced into work from home and this is a, you know, this is, you know, retracting our choice from the government and blah, blah, blah. And the more that we can say, this is an opportunity. This is an opportunity for personal growth and innovation of our company, the better. And we can really help our minds understand that by thinking of this as a literal workplace transition. We are actually moving from one workplace into another. So just as if we were in an office and we were packing everything in a box and we were gonna take that box to the new office. We would think carefully about what we put into that box, right? Like we would have certain papers that we would throw away or certain objects that were like, you know what? This isn't worth hauling across the country. We're just gonna, you know, only the best things we're gonna keep and move into the new office. And that's exactly what we're doing right now as a society and as business leaders and as individuals, like, okay, this is how everything operated previously in our office, in our traditional workforce. However, this is a time of transition. What do we wanna keep and what do we wanna let go of? What's not necessary anymore and what is actually critical? And we can do that with everything. We can do that with our workflows, with our tools, with our meetings, with our culture activities, with everything, like what fits into the new space and what doesn't and use this as a time of, again, like innovation and celebration and a new start that we can make this new employee experience and this new workplace into anything that we want it to be and only keep the best elements. That's so empowering. Hey, we're moving offices. What do we keep? What do we retool? What do we evaluate? This is an amazing time to audit how we do everything and it's an opportunity to change things. I've recommended that leaders look at all spaces as being the same, as in headquarters or your office that you're used to commuting into is just another place to go to work remotely. It is on no higher pedestal than a we work or than a spare bedroom or a vehicle, wherever it may be. An airplane seat, a hotel room, if you focus your workflows on any space being an office, it puts you in the mindset to consider where your company needs to go. This has been a fascinating conversation. I've really enjoyed it. I want to close with two questions. We try to ask everyone two questions at the end and the first is, what does your work setup look like for those that are trying to get tips and advice from folks that have worked remote for a really long time? Oh, this is a good question. I mean, I can show it. I don't know if you wanna see, but I am a very much a minimalist. We lived nomadically for a little while and now we have a farm in Connecticut. And so I'm always a little bit jealous. My background like way, way long time ago, beginning of my career was spent as an interior designer. And so it's very ironic cause I would love to have like this beautiful room and this beautiful setup. However, I'm super basic in my setup. And so I see like all of these tech guys and other founders that have like their Megatron, like what is that from the office, Megadask, right? And they've got like amazing lighting and everything in my. So I have an external keyboard and mouse. I have my laptop raised on a stand. So for ergonomics, I have a ring light and a webcam. And that's it. That's my entire setup. And I like that it's mobile so I can move around to where my kids are. And so, especially with like online learning and distance learning happening and being part of our new normal. It's nice to be able to go to where they are and not lock myself in the office. Yeah, I love that. It's fascinating. Everyone's workplace looks different and that's goes back to your point about diversity and inclusion. You never really know what workspace is going to work best for each individual person. But when you leave it up to them to design instead of office cubicle, more freedom for them to build the ergonomic and healthy workspace that works for them. All right, last question. What's one good thing you've seen, heard or experienced in the last month? You know, this is a tricky question. We were laughing about this before the recording because it's a volatile time, isn't it? However, I'm feeling extremely empowered today. First, I think this is turning a bitter into a sweet, right? A few weeks ago, I was doing a lot of research and involvement with our government contracts and I was just feeling very abandoned and just thinking, oh man, this is frustrating that these processes are moving so slowly and that the people as a whole, not just in the United States, but around the world just aren't getting access to the resources that they need to make this massive change to telework and to help the adoption. However, I'm seeing this rise of the private sector that before the public and private were very, very separate and they lived in very separate worlds and they still are as of right now, but I'm seeing a glimpse of this future in which the responsibilities of leadership, of our communities, of our socioeconomics, of our countries are really shared with the private sector and the public sector working together to change and inspire a difference. So yeah, that's something that I'm feeling very, very hopeful about today is, okay, we can each make a difference. Like every single individual has a role to play in the new normal. Love that, love that. Inspiring words to end on. For the audience, thank you so much for joining us. Be sure to check out Laurel and distribute consulting on Twitter, the web and LinkedIn and you can learn more about GitLab's all remote guides at allremote.info. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn as well. And more importantly, be sure to be excellent to one another. Aloha and Mahalo.