 I'm Annie Dean. I'm the director of remote work at Facebook. And I know this is a new role for many of you who are in this session, for many companies. And I thought this session called how to head of remote work would be a great time to share our experiences and keep you in the loop about how we're approaching this role at Facebook. There are four things that I wanted to talk to you about today. The first is my journey and Facebook's journey to creating this role. The second is our vision and key principles. The third is four easy steps to sort of get your arms around and begin to design the work, the teams, and the initiatives that are involved. And then a couple of case studies on strategies that we are currently working through today. I know this session is recorded, but I will be part of the live chat when it's broadcast. And I'm always very happy to connect with any members of the remote community through Facebook or LinkedIn at any time after this session. So I know there's many of us out there coming from lots of different backgrounds to lead remote work in our companies. And I thought it might help to share my background and how I found myself in this role as the first part of our conversation. I started to really become interested in new ways of working when I was an associate in my first job, which was as an associate at a corporate law firm. And I was 27 years old with a new baby and I was at a stage in my career where I really didn't have the autonomy over my schedule. So it was often working late into the night, one, two, three o'clock in the morning, waiting for documents to come across my desk, and days would go by where I wouldn't see my baby during waking hours. And honestly, I had never experienced the amount of pain that that caused me emotionally and physically. I felt like my identity as a career person, which was always how I had to find myself, was slipping away from me. And I didn't think it was candidly fair that I shouldn't be able to pursue something I loved like my work life with something else that I loved, like my new baby. And I really felt like it was the structure of work that was holding me back from being able to manage these things. And I began to do a lot of research and get really curious about the history of that structure of work and why it exists and how it existed, things that are part of the common conversation today, but weren't back in 2012 and 13 when my baby was young. So I toughed it out, and I continued in my legal career for the next couple of years, but then I had another son and he was born with severe medical challenges. And that really inspired me to start to do something about this structure of work that I felt was holding me back, as well as many others. And so I quit my job and I founded a data and analytics startup that we used data to begin to influence executives to understand that remote and flexible working wasn't a lifestyle choice. It was a way to strategically get to better outcomes for a more diverse workforce and to create pathways for different types of people that were not just one size fits all. I started this work in 2015 and in 2020, the company was acquired. And I actually wondered if I might move on from the topic because we were seeing a lot of traction and interest from very serious companies and certainly business units and pockets of companies were beginning to roll out flexibility in remote working policies in earnest, but things were holding us back, like leadership not being fully aligned. And that was preventing whole companies from really adopting these new ways of working and even basic technology infrastructure wasn't in place. So as early as early 2020, late 2019, when I would get to the kind of consulting aspect of my work, I was talking to CIOs about having, video conferencing be a default option in the meeting environment. And that's really, really crazy to think about now that we spend all of our time in workplace rooms or Zoom or the other video conferencing that is so part of our day-to-day life. But then just weeks later, when I started my next role at a consulting firm, the world rapidly changed. Finally, there was a set of political technology, economic incentives to really change the way that we were working to match our technology capabilities and expectations as a new generation of workers to embrace flexibility and remote work in this new way and sort of poof, we were in the future of work in a new way. And I really doubled down on the opportunity to continue to lead and influence within this space. So Facebook was always a company that I had my eye on as a thought leader in this space. I knew it was a company whose work was deeply entwined with technology. I knew it was a culture that was focused on the creation of community and that was very performance-driven. And those to me have always been key elements of success in a future of work world. And in 2020, when Mark announced that Facebook would be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale, I knew something really special was happening because creating communities across distance was in Facebook or is in Facebook's DNA and our technologies like portal workplace and Oculus really give us a unique advantage in this transformation. So when I found out that there was a director for remote work role open, I was deeply excited about it and really committed to the opportunity to lead this transformational work at Facebook. And I have only been encouraged and excited since I joined. So I've been in the role for seven months now and our vision is to build a best in class experience to help everyone do the best work of their careers no matter where they're located. And we have a few principles to help us get there. The first principle is community first. The future of work is not about unconstrained individual choice. It's really about making sure that we are opening up new ways of working that support people, teams and organizations. And I think that tension between individual choice and organizations is a really interesting one that is a big topic of discussion within this space. And we've really intentionally leaned into our commitment to community at Facebook, which doesn't surprise me based on our DNA and is something that I deeply believe in as a leader in this space. Our second principle, it's about social by design. So this is all about figuring out how to build relationships in the virtual environment no matter where you're located from and it's about making relationships easy to discover and initiate and grow and making sure that all of our sort of working experience ranging from meetings to onboarding to others are all calibrated towards the development of new relationships, where the sustainment of existing ones. And then finally, our third principle is impact from everywhere. So we're looking towards a future where some people are in office, some people are remote and many teams will be distributed at any given moment across multiple buildings, multiple working rooms and multiple locations across the globe. So we need to make sure that the playing field stays level and that every person can fully and meaningfully participate no matter where they're located from. So now that you know how I found myself at Facebook and our vision and principles for the work, I thought it'd be helpful to walk through four simple steps about how to get your arms around and begin to design the work. The first step is about establishing a common language. The second step is about defining the partner teams. The third step is about designing and structuring the work itself. So we'll talk about how I'm designing my team and the key initiatives that we're working on right now. And then finally, the last step is about communicating progress and committing to a learning mindset. The first step is to establish a common language. So this was one of the first challenges that I had when I first arrived at Facebook. I recognized that people were talking past each other and using the term remote to mean many different things. So one of my first tasks was to build a glossary of about 20 different terms and to make sure that people just had the clarity to advance conversations in a high pressure environment, but also to make sure that our systems, data architecture and other systems of record reflected the reality of these concepts. And I would say that there were three key benefits to that. One, we wanted to be sure that people understood that working remotely, those who had truly elected to choose a remote setup were different from those people who had been forced to work from home in the COVID environment. We knew that those people's experience was vastly different and we needed to make sure that in our experience data, this was something that was well understood by leaders. We also wanted to be sure that people understood that while the remote population is a discrete section of our overall employee population, everybody is a distributed worker. So as we designed to support remote skills and behaviors, that actually has a positive impact on every person at Facebook because of the need to continue to be distributed. And even before the pandemic, we had already seen that we were trending towards greater distribution in meetings, in teams and other key areas. We also wanted to be sure that our data and architecture and data architecture and research aligned to our strategic understanding of these definitions. And there was some sort of manipulation in work to be done around that backend architecture when we first started to reconcile what these terms mean. Finally, I'll call out that many of you are likely working through a concept called cross-border remote. This is a term of art that means that a role or a person can move across a border and continue in their current job. And when that person moves to the net, to the international country, they are localized into a local employment contract and are subject to the laws and regulations of that new country. In my conversations with many of you in the field, I think we all have an early consensus that this is one of the most challenging and difficult aspects of enabling remote work because of the emerging regulatory and compliance landscape in this area. So I thought I'd call it out as a relevant term in case you all are struggling through it like I am. The next step is to define the partner teams. So one of the most complex parts of this role is the highly cross-functional nature of the work. Remote is essentially a horizontal across the company. So defining your partner teams is a critical next step. I work with 20 different teams at Facebook and that number is growing all of the time. And it's a testament to how committed Facebook is to remote work and also an incredible experience for me because of the number of colleagues that I get to work with, collaborate with and meet in pursuit of advancing this work. I loosely think of our teams as divided into three categories, people, products and places. And when I say people, I'm not just referring to the remote team. This work includes our experts in managers, DEI, careers, learning, benefits and compensation, compliance, legal, finance and many more. When I'm talking about products, I'm including those teams that are building internal tools for people like our remote work approval tool, as well as for external teams that are focused on new types of virtual experiences. And then places includes designers, forecasters and technology teams that bring physical experiences to life. The next element is about designing the work. So when I started in this role seven months ago, I was drinking from a fire hose. It was incredible the amount of need that existed across the company to get questions answered, to build new processes, to help provide support. And I knew that we needed to build structure into the work itself, but it really took me six months of understanding those requests and those areas of need across the company to begin to design and organize what that work might look like from a standpoint of designing team members and having verticals or pillars within the team itself. So I'll caveat here that what you see here is how we're approaching this work today. Certainly may not be the same way that we approach this work in months in the future as our program and approach continues to mature. And your design for your own team may be very different because I think this work is vastly different based on the size and complexity and the global nature of your business. So I'll share the four pillars that are on my team today as well as a key initiative that each of these team members is working through. So with respect to run the business, this is what I call for the kind of group of activities that enable employees to go from remote curious to remote active and supporting the entire ecosystem of processes, knowledge, policies and partners that touch those set of activities. And a key area of this work is the remote request tool. So the remote request tool is a tool that we've internally built. It helps employees get the support they need when they are curious about remote work to understand what their changes to their setup might be, what their benefits might be. It gives them the opportunity to request remote work. It automates different levels of approval from managers and other levels of the organization. And then once that approval process is finalized, it automates the transfer process with documentation and sort of the operational process related to the transfer. The next pillar is about movement. So this is the process of strategically and compliantly distributing roles and people across the world to locations where remote work will be performed. And this team is deeply focused right now on cross-border remote work, that really difficult area that I was talking about earlier and it's the ability to take jobs across borders. Our approach is to open a small number of countries at a time. We just announced an early focus in 2022 on new countries within EMEA. And this team is deeply partnering with a variety of compliance teams to make sure that we can relocate those jobs in a compliant way. The next vertical or pillar is about employee experience and brand. So the goal here is to build a best in class remote employee experience across people, products and places. It's also to create a trusted internal brand and to communicate with the company at all levels about our progress. Onboarding is a key focus here and that onboarding is not just about new hire onboarding or bringing new remote workers into the ecosystem and into the company, but also to help internal transfers. So those people who have requested remote work internally and are transferring into a remote role, how do we make sure that they feel inspired, have clarity on what their benefits are and are connected to the company despite the fact that they're moving into a remote position? Our last pillar is about strategy, innovation and research. And the goal here is to define and support Facebook strategy to redesign work for distributed and hybrid effectiveness. Again, through people practices, people practices, product and facilities. And one of the things that we're working on right now which I'll talk about in a little bit more detail in a couple of slides is that we're working with an XFN team across research, product and people to get to the heart of meetings. What kinds of meetings are valuable? How can we recommend practices that increase their value, have product features within our VC interface and other elements of our product ecosystem to make sure that that value is accessed seamlessly. And I'll talk more about what we're optimizing for when we go into this as a case study. The final step that I think is really important to communicate as anyone who's taking on this role is the idea of communicating progress and a commitment to learning. At Facebook, everything is 1% finished. It's our mantra, it's how we operate. And one of our most important messages to our people is that we don't have all of the answers. And we need to continue to build the future through experimentation and iteration and learning together. So I think one of the things that we're really trying to establish in the way that we communicate and in the programs and policies that we develop is that we're deeply committed to a learning mindset rooted in research. And we transparently share where we are in our journey to make sure that people really feel along for the ride and invested in this experimentation so that we can confidently try new things without being held back by fear. I think that if you're in this role, you would agree with me that so much speculation exists as to what is going to be an absolute failure in the hybrid world or what is going to be table stakes for employees going forward. The media is divided, our own community is divided on what really, really matters and how we'll get there. And so I think all of us acknowledge that none of us has a crystal ball and the more that we can lean into learning, the faster we'll get to the future that we all really want to be part of. So I hope these four steps have been informative to think through how you're designing the work, how you're building out your new function in the head of remote. And again, I'd love to hear from you. Before we fully wrap up this conversation, I wanted to dive more deeply into a couple of case studies of areas that we're currently working through. One that we just announced, collaboration zones and one that's really top of mind going into this next half around building better meetings. So with respect to collaboration zones, we recently announced that we'll be expanding cross-border remote work in the context of newly formed collaboration zones. So many of you who are in this role, especially at larger companies, are probably toying with the idea of how to organize teams with remote workers to ensure that everyone stays connected. There are a lot of different methods and ideas around this, whether we need to look at commutable distance from an office, where how we make sure that time zones are compatible and we wanted to go with a rule of thumb that was as simple and all-encompassing as possible because we knew that we wanted to optimize for team and community help while creating ample choice for employees to choose where they live and also create new opportunities for us to source talent in a more frictionless way. So ultimately we decided to establish three collaboration zones, the Americas, EMEA and APAC, and the goal was to have whole teams located within a single discrete zone. So long as a whole team is within the zone, they will have compatible time zones and will overlap for about half of a business day, even if they are thousands and thousands of miles apart. So looking at that, person who might be located in Anchorage versus that person that might be located in Chile in the Americas, they're quite far apart, but they continue to have a half-day overlap in their time zone so they can stay connected. Now I'll share that not every single team fits into this paradigm. Some teams do fall across collaboration zones, specifically those that have strategically determined that they have a very global talent strategy or location strategy. But what I love about this is that it continues to enable us to organize around synchronous work. We're not at a place as a company where we are so committed to and ready for asynchronous work in a way that would enable us to kind of untether our teams to an asynchronous format. I think we really need to build the technology and people processes to support that. And there are some strategic reasons why we continue to need the opportunity to work synchronously. We're a product company. So with that said, as we continue to advance our asynchronous skills, we may decide that we want to advance our approach with collaboration zones going forward. And I think that's a testament to the fact that we are in a learning mindset and we continue to build structures that are simple and scalable and adjust them based on what we learn. The final area that I wanted to share with you today is about better meetings. So we recently convened a wide range of leaders that are cross-functionally responsible for remote work. And we did a review and we did a knowledge harvest of all of the research we had conducted at Facebook over the course of the pandemic about remote working. And we use that to inform problem statement workshops, identifying key problem statements, representing key pain points in the remote employee experience and in the distributed work experience across the company. And one of the things that surfaced as an opportunity for a high-scale solution impacting our overall ability to increase our capability in distributed work was this idea of building better meetings. And we are now convening a cross-functional team to understand what this looks like and our focus on optimizing meetings in three key areas. The first is about relationships. So we have a hypothesis that we want to make meetings more fun and social and make meetings themselves a breeding ground for new relationship development as well as strengthening existing relationships. So when I think about meetings, it's this shared experience. And how can we create a really multimedia experience within that shared setting to make sure that new people can really connect? I think one of the things that is a watch out in this pandemic environment is the fact that we've been treating relationship development separately from the work that gets done. And I think of Zoom happy hours as an early example of that. So how do we create time-neutral moments for relationship development that make it easy to have relationships flourish? The next element is about efficiency and effectiveness. And I think this all comes down to a new understanding of what is valuable about meetings. How do we make meetings more effective by aligning to that value? And we just conducted a research study looking at 19,000 different meetings to get closer to that answer. And then hopefully to build product features and people practices that get closer to that answer. Finally, we're really concerned about equity. How do we make sure that people can contribute to meetings no matter where they're located? And I think this really, one of the sort of archetypical examples of this is when we get back to the office and you have two people in a conference room and two people who are in distributed or remote settings and those two people in the conference room want to pick up the whiteboard marker and write on the whiteboard that the distributed members can't see. How do we create an experience that doesn't degrade the experience of those in-person players while making sure that we are inclusive of those two people who are distributed? So we're really thinking about this from a location equity perspective. And of course always have diversity and inclusion top of mind whenever we're thinking about remote or any activity at Facebook. We are so excited to be able to continue to advance this work in the next half in the years to come and create a better experience for our employees at Facebook, whether they are remote workers, distributed workers or in-office workers collaborating with either of those two archetypes as well. So good luck to you as you continue to define your role as head of remote. Thank you so much to Darren and to GitLab for inviting me today and creating this incredible space to share ideas as well as to always be a great place to create new resources to educate the world on how to succeed in these environments. So thank you. I hope I'll have a chance to connect with you soon and good luck to you.