 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studio today as kind of our ongoing leadership coverage of what's happening with the COVID crisis and really looking out into our community to find experts who can provide tips and tricks and some guidance as everyone is kind of charting these uncharted waters, if you will. And we've got a great CUBE alum in our database. He's a fantastic resource, so we're excited to get him on, share the information with you. We'd like to welcome once again, Darren Murph. He is the head of remote for GitLab. Darren, great to see you. Absolutely, great to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely, so thank you. And first off, we had you on earlier this year, back when things were normal and kind of a regular interview. Who knew that you would be at the center of the work from home universe just a few short months later? I mean, you've been doing this forever. So it's kind of a wily old veteran of kind of the work from home or not even from home, just work from someplace else. What are some top level things that you can share for people that have never experienced this before? Yeah, on the working front, if you are one of the people that are working from home, I think there's a couple of things you can do to help acclimate and make your world a little bit better. The first is to try to create some sort of separation between your work life and your personal life. Now, if you have a home big enough that you can dedicate a workspace to being your office, that's gonna help a lot, help focus standpoint and just, you don't want those lines between work and life to blur too much. That's where isolation kicks in, that's where burnout kicks in. You wanna do whatever you can to avoid. You gotta remember, when you're not physically walking out of an office and disconnecting from work, you have to replicate that and recreate that. I actually recommend for people that used to have a commute and now they don't, I would actually block something in your calendar, whether that's cooking, cleaning, spending time with your family, resting more, anything so that you ramp into your day very deliberately and ramp out of the day very deliberately. Now, on the team leading front, I was gonna, I'm gonna say that it may feel a little counterintuitive, but the further your team is from you, the more distributed they are, the more you really need to let go and allow them to have a mechanism for feeding back to you. Manager's job in a remote setting switches from just being a pure director to actually being an unblocker and a really active listener. And for people that have gotten to a certain point in their career through command and control, this is gonna feel very strange, jarring and counterintuitive, but we've seen it time and time again. You need to trust that your workers are in a new environment. You have to give them a mechanism feeding back to you to help them unblock whatever it is that's in control. You know, it's funny. We had someone on as part of this the other day talking about, you know, leaders need to change their, their objectives that they're managing to from kind of activity-based to deliverals-based. And it actually floored me that someone is still writing in a blog in 2020 that people have to change their management deliverables from activity to deliverables. And it was so funny, you know, you had Martin Mikosan, we had him on too. My favorite comment was it's so easy to fake it in the office and look busy, but when you're at home, all you have is your deliverable. So it really, it seems like this kind of a forcing function to get people to pay attention to the things they should be managing to anyway. You said it, forcing functions. I talk about this all the time, but there are so many forcing functions in remote that help you do remote well, but not only just do remote well, just run your business well, even if you plan on going back to the office on some level. There's a lot of things you can do now to have paid the infrastructure for creating a better and more effective team. And as a manager, if you haven't been writing down the metrics or expectations for your direct reports in the office, now's the time to do it. Subjectivity is allowed to flourish in the office. You can praise or promote people just kind of how much you like them or how easy they are to work with. That really has nothing to do with metrics and results to drive. I've often been asked, well, how do you know if someone's working remotely? My response is, you know, if they were working in the office, if you can't clearly answer that in the office, then you're not going to be able to answer it remotely. So frankly, in these times, a lot of the burden falls more on the manager to actually take a hard look at what they are clarifying to their team. And if the metrics aren't laid out, it's on the manager to lay that out. It's not the responsibility of the direct report to figure out how to prove their work. The manager has to be very articulate about what that value looks like. Right. And not only do they have to be articulate about what the deliverables are and what their expectations are, but you guys have a remote playbook. GitLab is published, which is terrific. People should go online. There's 38 pages of dense, dense, dense material. So it's a terrific resource. It's open source. You got to love the open source ethos. But one of the slides that jumped out to me and it's consistent with a lot of these conversations that we're having is that your frequency of communications when people are not in the same room together has to go up dramatically, which is a little counterintuitive. But what I found even more interesting was the variety of types of communication, not just your kind of standard meeting or your standard status on a project or maybe a little bit of a look forward to some strategic stuff, but you outlined a whole variety of types of communication objectives or methods or feel, if you will, to help people stay connected and to help kind of keep this team building going forward. So here's the thing about communication. You've got to be intentional about it in a remote setting. And in fact, you need to have more intentionality across the board in a remote setting and communications is just a very obvious way. So for a lot of companies, they leave a lot of things to kind of spontaneity and fate. Interpersonal relationships and communications are two of the biggest ones. Where you may not actually lay out a plan for how work is communicated about or what opportunities you give people to chat about their weekends or sports or anything like that. You just kind of put them in the same building and then people just kind of figure it out. In a remote setting, that's unwise. You're going to get a lot of chaos and dysfunction when people don't know how to communicate in on what channel. So at GitLab, we're very prescriptive that work communication happens in a GitLab issue or emerge request. And then informal communication happens through Zoom calls or Slack. We actually expire our Slack messages after 90 days specifically to force people not to do work in Slack. We want the work to begin where it needs to end up. And in that case, it's a tool GitLab that's built for asynchronous communication. We want to continue to encourage that bias towards asynchronous communication. So yeah, we write down everything about how we want people to communicate and through what channels. And that may sound like a lot of rules but actually it's very much appreciated by a global team. We have over 1200 people in more than 65 countries and they all just need to know where communication is going to happen. Our team is really cohesive and on the same page because we're articulate. So I want to double down on that on the asynchronous piece because you brought this up or you and Stu brought it up in your conversation with Stu and Stu raised an interesting point, right? Then unfortunately in the day of email and connected phones and this and that there has grown an expectation that used to be kind of business okay was I'll get back to you within 24 hours, right? If you leave me a voicemail. And Lord knows what it was when we were still typing letters and memos and sticking stuff in the yellow envelopes with the string, right? It was multiple days. But somehow that all got changed to I need to hear back from you now. And often it feels like if you're trying to have just some uninterrupted work time to get something done like why is your lack of planning suddenly my emergency? And you talked about you can't operate that on a global asynchronous team because everyone's in different time zones and just by rule there are going to be a lot of people that are not awake when you need the answer to that question. But that you've developed a culture that that's okay and that that is kind of the flow and the pacing which A forces people to ask in advance not immediately when you need it but also gives people unfettered time to actually plan to do work versus plan to answer communication. So I wonder if you can dig into how did that evolve in and how do you enforce that when somebody comes in from the outside world? The real key to that is something that might not be immediately apparent to everyone which is a hit lab. We try to shift as much burden as we possibly can humans to documentation. And this even starts at onboarding where to get onboarded at GitLab you get an onboarding issue within GitLab with over 200 check boxes of things to read and knowledge assessments to take and humans are a part of it but very minimal compared to what most companies would do. And the thing that you just outlined was we're talking about asking questions or tapping someone on the shoulder to fill in a knowledge gap. But in GitLab, we want to write everything down in a very formalized structured way. We try to work handbook first. So we need to document all of our processes protocols and solutions basically everything that we've ever seen or done needs to be documented in the handbook. So it's not that GitLab team members are just magically need less information. It's just that instead of having to ask someone or a team we go ask the handbook. We go consult the documentation and the more rich that your documentation is the less you have to bother other people and the less you need to rely on synchronicity. So for us it all starts with operating handbook first that allows our humans to reserve their cycles for doing truly creative things not just answering a question for the thousands of times. Right. Another thing you covered which I really enjoyed was getting senior executives to work from home for an extended period of time. Now obviously before COVID that would probably be a lot harder to do. Well now COVID has forced that. And I think to your point about that is it really forces the empathy for someone who had no interest in working from home didn't like to work from home, loves going to the office, has the routine been doing it for decades to kind of wake up to A, you need to have more empathy for what this is all about and B, what's it all about by actually doing it. So I wonder kind of your take in the movement to more of a work from anywhere future now that all the senior executives have been thrown into this work from home situation. Look, Jeff, you never want to waste a crisis. We can't wish away the crisis that's in front of us but we can choose how we respond to it. And this does present an opportunity to lay groundwork, to lay infrastructure, to build a more remote organization. And I have absolutely advocated for companies to get their leadership teams out of the office for a meaningful amount of time, a month ideally a quarter so that they actually understand what the remote life is. They actually have some of those communication gaps and challenges so they can document what's happening and then help fix it. But to your point, executives love going to the office because they're on a different playing field to begin with. They usually have an executive assistant, things are just, there's less friction in general. So it behooves them to just kind of keep charging in that direction. But now what we have is a situation where all of those executives are remote. And I'm seeing a lot of them say, you know what, I'm seeing the myths that I have perpetrated break down in front of them. And this is even in the most suboptimal time ever to go remote. This is a remote work. This is crisis induced work from home. We're all dealing with social isolation. Our parents are also doubling as homeschool teachers. We have a lot going on. And even on top of all of that, I'm amazed at how adaptable that the human society has been in just adjusting to this and figuring it out on the fly. And I think the companies that take this opportunity to ask themselves the right question and build this into their ongoing talent and operational strategy will actually come out stronger on the other side. Yeah, as you said, this is as challenging as it's ever been. There was no, there was no planning ahead. Your spouse or significant others also working from home and has the same Zoom schedule as you do for some strange reason, right? The kids are home, as you said in your homeschooling them. And they also have to get on Zoom to do their classes. So it's really suboptimal. But as you said, it's a forcing function and people are going to learn. One of the other things in your handbook is the kind of definitions. It's not just work from home or work at the office, but there's actually a continuum and a spectrum. And as people are doing this for weeks and months and behaviors turn into habits, people are not going to want to go back to sitting on 101 for two hours every morning to go work on a laptop in the office. It just doesn't make sense. So as you kind of look forward, how do you see kind of the evolution? How are people taking baby steps, if you will, to incorporate more of this learning as we go forward and incorporate into more of their regular, everyday kind of procedures? I'm really optimistic about the future because what I see happening here is people are unlocking their imaginations. So once they've kind of stabilized, they're starting to realize, hey, I'm getting a lot more time with my family. I'm spending a lot less gas. I just feel better as a person because I don't show up to work every day with road rage. So how can I keep this going? And I genuinely think what's gonna happen in four or five months, we're gonna have millions of people collectively look at each other. And they say, you know, the boss just called me back into the office, but I just did my job from home, even in suboptimal conditions. I saw my family more, I exercised more, I had more time to cook and clean. How about, no, I'm not gonna go back to the office as my default location. And I think what's gonna happen is the 80-20 rule is gonna flip. Right now, people work from home only for a special occasion, like the cable companies come for something like that. Going forward, I think the offices are going to be the special occasion. You're only gonna commute to the office or fly to the office when you have a large contingent of people coming in and you need to wind and dine them or something like that. And the second order of this is people that are only living in expensive cities because of their vocation. When their lease comes up for renewal, they're gonna cast a glance at places like Wyoming and Idaho and Iowa, maybe even Vietnam and Cambodia. Far-flung places because now you have them thinking of what could life look like if I decouple geography and work. I still wanna work really hard and contribute this knowledge but I can go to a place with better air quality, better schools, better opportunity to actually invest in a smaller community where I can see real impact. And I think that's just gonna have massive, massive societal impacts. People are really taking this time to consider how tightly their identity has been woven into work now that they're home and they've become something more than just whatever the office life has defined them as. I think that's really healthy. I think a lot of people may have intertwined those two things too tightly in the past and now it's a forcing function to really ask yourself, you know, you are just your work. You're more than your work and what can that look like when you can do that job from anywhere? Right, right. And as you said, there's so many, you know, kind of secondary benefits in terms of, you know, traffic and infrastructure and the environment and all kinds of things. And the other thing, I think that's interesting what you said, 80, 20. I think that was pretty generous. I wouldn't give it 20% but if people, you know, even in this hybrid steps, you know, do more once a week, twice a week, once every two weeks, right? The impact on the infrastructure and people's lives is gonna be huge. But I wanted to drill on something as we go into kind of this hybrid mode at some point in time. And you talked about it. I thought it was fascinating about the norms and really coming at it from a work from home first or a work from anywhere first. You're very good at specifying. Anywhere doesn't mean home. Could be the library, could be the coffee shop, could be an office, could be a we work, could be wherever. But you talked about the new norms and the one I thought was really interesting which probably impacts a lot of teams is when some of the team is in the office and some of the team isn't, the typical move right is to have everyone in the office go into the conference room. We sit around one big screen. So you got like five people sitting around one table and you got a bunch of heads, you know, on Zoom. And you said, you know, no, let's all be remote. So we just happen to be sitting on our desk. We're sitting on our desk. If we happen to be in the office, that's okay. But really normalize. And like we saw the movement from cloud, go to cloud and to cloud first, why not cloud? And then, you know, kind of mobile and does it work at a mobile? No, no, no, it has to work. It's mobile first. Really this shift to not can it be done at home but tell me why it shouldn't be done at home. A really different kind of opening position as to how people deploy resources and think about staffing and assigning teams. It's like turning the whole thing upside down. Completely upside down. I think remote first to your point is going to be the default going forward. I think we're just one or two quarters away from major CEOs sitting on the hot seat on CNBC when it's a return for quarterly earnings. And they're going to have to justify why they're spending what they spend on real estate. Because if you're spending a billion dollars a year on real estate, you could easily deploy that to more people, more R and D. Once that question is asked in mass, that is when you're going to see the next phase of where you really have to justify even from a cost standpoint, why are you spending so much? Why are you tying so much of your business results to geography? Now, the thing about remote first is that it's not us versus them. A lot of what we've learned in GitLab and how we operate so efficiently, they work really well for remote teams and they are remote first, but they would work just as well in an office. We attach a Google doc agenda to every single business meeting that we have so that there's always an artifact, there's always some documented thread on what happened in a meeting. Now, this would work just as well in a co-located meeting. Who wouldn't want to have a meeting where it's not just in one ear and out the other? You're going to give the time to the meeting, you might as well get something out of it. And so a lot of these remote first forcing functions, they do help remote teams work well, but I think it's especially important for hybrid teams. So like offices aren't going to vanish overnight. A lot of these companies are going to have some part of their company return to the office when travel restrictions are lifted. I think the key here is that it's going to be a lot more fluid. You're never going to know on a day-to-day basis who is coming into the office and who is not. So you need to optimize for everyone being out of the office. And then if they just so happen to be there, they just so happen to be there. Right, right. So before we, I want to get into one little nitty gritty subject in terms of investment into the home office. You know, we're doing 100% remote interviews now on theCUBE, right? We used to go to pretty much, probably 80% of our business was at events or at people's offices or facilities. Now it's all dialing. You talked a lot about, you know, people need to flex a little bit on enabling people to invest in the little bits of pieces of infrastructure for their home office that they just don't have, you know, the same setups. And, you know, you talk about multiple monitors, a comfortable chair, a good light, you know, that there's a few things that you can invest in. Not tremendous amounts of money, but a couple hundred bucks here and there to make a big difference on the homework environment and how people should think about making that investment into a big monitor that they don't see. It's not sitting at the desk in the office. 100%. Like if you're coming from a co-located space, you're probably sitting in a cube that costs five, 10, maybe $20,000 together. You might not notice that, but it's not cheap to build cubicles in a high rise. And if you go to your home and you have nothing set up, I would say it's on the people group to think really hard about being more lax and more lenient about spending policy. People need multiple monitors. You need a decent webcam, you need a decent microphone. You need a chair that isn't gonna kill your back. You want to help people create healthy, ergonomic, sustainable workspaces in their home. This is the kind of thing that will inevitably impact productivity before someone to just be hunched over on their couch in front of a 13-inch laptop. I mean, what kind of productivity do you really expect from that? That's not a great long-term solution. Nothing, the people group actually has a higher burden to bear all the way around. Even when it comes to making sure teams feel like teams and they have the atmosphere to connect on a meaningful level, it comes down to the people group to not letting that just go to spawn today. You wanna have a happy hour virtually, you're gonna have to put a calendar in by the people's calendar. You're gonna create topical channels in Slack for people to talk about things other than work. Someone's gonna have to do that. They don't just happen by default. So from hardware all the way to communication, the people group really needs to use this opportunity to think about, okay, what can we unlock in this new world? Right. And I'm glad you said the people group and not the resources group because they're not coal or steel or factory. No, if anything, COVID has humanized this in a way and I think it's actually a really big silver lining where we're all now peering into each other's homes and it is glaringly obvious that we're all humans first, colleagues second. And of course that's always been the case, but there's something about a sterile co-located work environment. You check a piece of you at the door and you just kind of get down to business. And why is that? We have technology at our fingertips. We can be humans with each other and that's gonna actually encourage more empathy. And as we've seen at GitLab, more empathy leads to better business results. It leads to more meaningful connections. Now I have people, friends located all over the world that I feel like I have a closer bond with, a closer, more intimate connection with than a lot of people I've met in office. To some degree, you don't know who they really are. You don't know what they really love and what they're saying. Right, right. All right, Darren. So before I let you go, and again, thank you for the time of the conversation. I'm sure everyone is calling you up and I just love the open source ethos and the sharing. It's such a huge impact on the technology world and second order impacts that a lot of people take advantage. Again, give us the place that people can go for the playbook so they can come and leverage some of the resources. And again, thank you guys for publishing them. Absolutely. So we're open source. We try to open source all of our learnings on remote. So go to allremote.info. That will redirect you right into the all remote section of the GetLap handbook, all of which is open source right at the top. You can download the remote playbook, which is PDF talked about. Download that. It takes you through all of our best information on getting started and thriving as a remote team. Just under that, there's a lot of comprehensive guides on how we think about every, from how we operate synchronously, to how we handle meetings, even hiring and compensation. Allremote.info. And of course, you're welcome to reach out to me on Twitter. I'm at Darren Murph. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Darren. And I find it somewhat ironic that you have a jetliner over your shoulder waiting for the lockdown and the quarantined in so you can get back on that airplane. And we're looking forward to that day. Can't wait, man. I miss, I miss the airplanes. I told someone the other day, I never thought I'd say I miss having a middle seat at the very back of the airplane with someone who were climbed into my nose. But honestly, I can't take me in. I think you'll be fighting people for that seat in another month or so. All right. Thanks for, thanks a lot, Darren. Absolutely. Take care all. All right. He's Darren. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.