 Okay, let's get started. I'm sure people will continue to trickle in due to the room numbers being printed three different ways in three different places. Also, confusingly, my colleague Ian is doing a session right now called Creating a Culture of Performance, which was intended to be kind of a playoff of the title of this, and then the joke cut a little too close to home when they got scheduled at the same time. So there we are. So welcome, you should be here creating a culture of empowerment. Today, we're going to talk about how the open source philosophy can be applied to management and organizational culture. My name is Todd Neinkirk. I'm digital strategist, CEO and partner at Four Kitchens. If you want to get a hold of me, that's how Todd at FourKitchens.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Todd Ross, warning in advance, it's mostly bad puns. So before we get started, I want to talk a little bit about this talk itself. This is a really unusual talk for a Drupalcon, because first of all, it's not about Drupal. It's not about the web. It's not about technology. And it's not even about process. Instead, it's about how we can apply the open source philosophy to management teams and people. There's going to be a lot of talk about feelings and structure and how people communicate and psychology and neurology and linguistics and things like that. So I want to thank all of you if you're out there who helped select this session. This session has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the sessions that you will be seeing at Drupalcon. And I think that that makes it special and a little bit risky. And I hope it pays off for you. Also, you're going to hear me talk a lot about what we do at Four Kitchens. That's because that's my experience. We're not bragging. This is all stuff that we've learned through successes and failures, mostly failures, the vast majority of which are failures. This is nine years of trial and error. We don't have all the answers. We're still working through a lot of these things. So again, I'm going to refer to Four Kitchens a lot because that's my experience. And finally, my opinions are based on my experience working within the United States. I've given this talk in other countries and a lot of this stuff doesn't apply. So for those of you from Europe or Latin America or Asia or anywhere else, we realize that there's going to be a lot of discussion of culture and what culture means and that varies drastically from place to place. So I understand if some of these things may not apply to you, but I hope that the underlying principles are something that you can at least think about and might guide your practice and you could adopt them wherever you're from. I am here today because I want to help people run better companies by making their teams and their leaders happier. How many of you here are business owners? How many of you are leaders within your organization? How many of you are neither? Thank you for being here. We are going to talk about some very specific tactical, practical things that you can bring back to work. You do not have to be a business owner or a leader within an organization to affect change. And I'll explain why a little bit later. So I want to tell a story. Two snacks per day. The summer of 2015, height of the .com bubble, I was working at a startup called Cyber Expo. Nobody's ever heard of it. That's okay. Cyber Expo was an organization that installed internet kiosks in shopping malls all over the country. Okay, that sounds like a stupid idea now because it is. But 15 years ago, you didn't have internet enabled devices in your pocket at the ready all of the time. If you were in a shopping mall and you wanted to look up the cost of different items at different stores or if you needed to check your email or whatever you wanted to do, just hang out and aim chat with your buddies, you would go up to one of these giant kiosks that had 12 of these extremely durable waterproof, childproof computers with plexiglass all over them and super heavy duty things. And they display ads across the top and big flash ads. It was kind of a mess. But it was a big deal and we were in something like 50 or 60 shopping malls all over the country. This was, of course, at the height of the .com bubble and it was that summer when everything burst. So, of course, everybody started to feel a little bit edgy about their jobs and where the funding was coming from and, you know, would they still have a job in six months? And then one day, I don't know if it was in July or August or when it was, but one day we got a company-wide email that said, effective immediately, you're still welcome to have snacks from the break room like those little bags of Doritos and coaks and things like that, but you can only have two a day. Period. End of the email. Okay, what did that do? Right? Morale? Okay. What were people thinking? Can't afford snacks anymore? Can they afford me? Anything else? There's some other stuff. Making arbitrary rules because it feels good. I haven't heard. That's true. That's true. So, let's think about what it takes when you put a rule in place. When you put a rule in place, what do you have to do? Enforce it. Right? How are you going to enforce this? Is this now somebody's job? Is that operations assistant or office manager or whatever? Are they going to have to spend their already busy day walking by people's desks or did they have a checkout room for the snacks where you, you know, I would please, may I have a 45 cent bag of Doritos? May I please have a can of Pepsi and then they write your name down on a list and then you get your allotted two snacks a day. Is that somebody's job now? To sit in the break room? No, of course not. So, then whose job is it? The CEO? That's an interesting one. I wish. Self-regulation. But let's say that doesn't happen. Who's left? Your peers. Your peers. So, what was happening now? Everybody was looking at everybody else and thinking, Todd had three snacks today. We're going to go out of business because I am. Right? That's what happened. It became everybody's job to police everybody else. So, more than morale going down the toilet because they were afraid for their jobs, because they thought, let's do the math by the way. Let's very quickly do the math. You go to Costco. Back then, this was in the Dallas area. All we had was Sam's Club. You go to Sam's Club. You get those giant snack packs of, I don't know, 60 bags or whatever for, let's say these things cost 30 cents a bag. Let's make it easy. I'm going to make it easy on myself because I have to do math on the fly in my head. I don't have these in notes. 50 cents a bag. 50 cents a bag. Okay. Two snacks a day. That's a dollar a day per person. $5 a week. Let's say I'm working about, let's make it easy again. 50 weeks a year. So that's $250 a year per person. $250 a year per person. And there were probably 20 people at the organization. So $5,000 a year in snacks. Is that anybody's salary? Is that going to save anybody's job? $5,000 a year? No. What's the point? So everybody does the math. The first thing they do when they get an email like this is they're like, ugh, like, okay, they can't afford me. I'm going to lose my job. I wonder how much they're spending on snacks. Now everybody wants to know and they start to add them all up in the fridge and everybody's passing it around. And now suddenly the snacks are an issue. What should they have done instead? Any ideas? I'm sorry? Double the snacks? That's interesting. Your quota has doubled from four to two snacks a day, right? Very 1984. Production has tripled, but it's been cut in half. Close. That's an interesting idea. They should have gotten rid of them completely. Just get rid of them completely. Sorry, there are no more snacks in the break room. Oh, well you still think they can't afford snacks anymore. You might still sit down and do the math, but nobody put the number two in your head, right? Just say, hey, we're phasing out the snacks. Sorry about that. Done. That's what they should have done. People would have known we got to tighten our belts. I get it. Money is money. This is an investment kind of thing. It's no job lasts forever. I understand that. People are forgiving generally. But when you start to limit it to something like this that feels arbitrary, people do the math and they start to freak out. Okay, that story is going to inform the rest of this afternoon's talk. We're talking about the culture of empowerment. Culture and empowerment. Let's talk about culture first. What do I mean when I say culture? The dictionary, the good old dictionary these days, it's dictionary.com. The dictionary defines culture as the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a social, ethnic or age group. Now your workplace is a form of a social group, right? You spend not quite a third, but again, let's make it easy on me, a third of your life at work, eight hours a day at work. That's a lot of time. That's a social group. That's as much time as you spend at home not sleeping. I believe though that culture goes a little bit deeper than that and science and history and things like this reflected. Culture, what does it do? It affects how you think and feel about a group. The culture of that group affects how you think and feel about them. I'm going to illustrate this right now. Let's do a little bit of an experiment. I want you to think about the culture of the United States. What is the culture of the United States? Just think about it for a moment. Oh, hold on, hold on. Just think about it silently to yourself. I'm going to show you a series of images and I want you to just mentally record what you're thinking and feeling as you look at these. Okay, back again. That was not a picture of the United States. That was my desktop. Okay, back to it. How did these images make you feel? I'm sorry? Awful. Oh my goodness. Okay, we're getting right to it. Awful. Awful. I'm sorry? Complex? Conflicted? Stereotypes? Excessive? Sorry? I still couldn't hear that. I apologize. Bigger go home. Gluttonous. Entitled? Entitled. Lots of different things. Now, some of those images, we all feel a little bit differently about, like the soldier, right? Some of us might react to that and think, here's somebody serving our country. I'm proud of this image. Some people may look at that and think I'm afraid of this image or that I don't feel quite as positively as that other person did, right? It depends on your point of view. It might be politics. It might be personal history. The point is, everybody here has a slightly different reaction to all of those things, especially in some. None of us here agree on the culture of the United States because we all react a little bit differently. The majority of us in this room being American, I assume, but not all of us. We all react a little bit differently to that. So there really isn't a culture. There is not a homogenous defined culture that we all subscribe to, right? Yet we're all in it and part of it. This is because culture has many layers. Culture isn't just about national identity. It's influenced by many other things. So there is a common underlying human culture. Anthropologists, social scientists, psychologists have all observed, for example, that there are an underlying set of emotions and facial expressions that are recognized across the globe regardless of culture. It could be tribes of people who haven't been contacted by the Western world to highly industrialized countries. A smile is a smile. A frown is a frown. A laugh is a laugh. It means the same thing the world over, regardless of culture, language, or anything. Language informs our culture. It informs our culture in very, very, very deep and profound ways. For example, there are, how does this example go? I'll come back to this one in a moment. I have a better example later. Language is a big part of our culture. How we speak informs how we think. You go from one part of the United States to another, from California to Philly to New York to Texas. We all use different language, right? That language reflects and both informs our culture. We have national cultures. The United States has a different culture from Canada. The two are very similar in many, many, many ways, but that is still a defining line. Nations have different laws, and laws both reflect and inform the underlying values. Universal healthcare or not is a value, and that informs culture. There's local culture. I already talked about Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, everywhere. Even a suburb outside of Austin where I'm from is a little bit different than Austin itself, local culture. Then, of course, there's the culture of the self. Each one of us has unique experiences, levels of education or things that you've studied, different family histories, different backgrounds. That's your personal culture. All of these different layers make up the culture that each one of us experiences. That's what I mean by culture. We're talking about the culture of empowerment. What is empowerment? What do I mean by empowerment? Again, goodoldictionary.com. Well, of course, it's the giving or delegation of power or authority. That's what's being given, but what's being received? What does it mean to be empowered? It's four things. First is autonomy. It's the autonomy to decide what you will do and how you will do it. It's freedom to challenge without fear of reprisal. If you challenge somebody, if you say, I don't think that's a good idea, and you're told to shut up, you're not truly free, right? You're not empowered. You should be able to speak your mind and not be sidelined or cut out of the club or fired or locked up. It's the power to effect change. You actually have to be able to make change and effect change in order to be empowered. To be told, but not actually be able to do anything, you're not actually empowered. And finally, ownership of the outcomes. So you have the autonomy, freedom, and power, but you have to be responsible for the outcomes of what you do as well, good or bad, success or failure. You have to be able to own that. So it comes down to these four things. Empowerment is these four things. Again, autonomy to decide what you will do and how you will do it. Freedom to challenge without fear of reprisal. Power to effect change. Ownership of outcomes. In other words, empowerment means controlling your destiny. You are in charge of your destiny if you are fully empowered. That's how I see it. So what? Why does it matter? Why is it important? And why is it important in a business context? Why are we talking about it here at a professional conference? First, empowerment makes teams happy. It increases productivity, quality, and retention. When people feel like they have destiny over the work that they're doing, they're happier. People want to have control over what they're doing. Empowerment makes your clients happy. The happiness of your team is infectious. Your clients see that. They hear it every day. They pick up on it in the tone of emails and conversations they have. The quality of the work, as I mentioned earlier, is going to be higher. So the clients are going to be happier, obviously. Your team is more enthusiastic about the work. And everyone on your team has the power to do what it takes to solve the client's problem. So the client can go to anybody on the team and say, I've got a problem with something. And your teammate can say, I'll take care of it. I got it. I can do something about that. But instead, they say, oh, that's not really my department. Or yeah, I don't know. My boss just told me. Or like, that's just kind of how we do it. Or one of those things. That erodes the client's confidence. And will ultimately turn them away. Finally, empowerment enables leadership. So the majority of you are business owners or leaders, as we discovered earlier. This actually means less work for you. When other people are empowered, they have been delegated to. It means you have less on your plate, which means you can do what you're supposed to be doing, which is leading, which is finding new revenue streams, building your organization, thinking ahead, learning about Drupal 8, whatever you have to do to remain competitive, you can start to think ahead. How many people here have said to your significant others or your friends or your coworkers or whoever at some point, I feel like all I'm doing is reacting instead of planning. This is very common. I probably say this once a week. That's what it is to run a business. You are constantly reacting to various problems. But the more you can delegate and the more you can empower other people to handle it, the less you have to be that top of the funnel. So I promised tactical, practical advice. I'm going to get to that in a moment. That's where we're going to spend the majority of our time. But I want to inform because I believe in explaining the why. It's the whole Simon's neck, like get to the why. It's true. So I want to talk about what has guided these specific actionable pieces of advice before we get into them, so that you understand where I'm coming from. First, build a company you would want to work for. So think for a moment. Just for a moment, then I'll ask for input. Why did you start a business? Why did you do that to yourself? Why did you start a business? Thoughts? It was an accident. So you were doing a thing that you liked and you had to do it more and you wound up hiring people and then suddenly there's a company now. Very common. Anybody else? You don't want to work for anybody. I'm sorry? That's a good point is that sometimes when you go into consulting, you think you want to be your own boss, but in fact all of your clients are your bosses. That's true, actually. But not wanting to be your own boss, not wanting to have to work for anybody. So you probably had some experiences in the past that were negative as it related to working for somebody, right? I don't mean to, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but you probably at previous jobs were not very empowered. You didn't have a lot of control over things and you thought, I don't want to deal with this. I'm going to strike out on my own, right? You didn't feel like you were trusted. Boy, we're going to get to that in a moment. All right. So on accident, I didn't want to work for anybody else often because I had bad experiences and I don't like work because nobody trusts me. They don't empower me. They don't do all these things. So people want to be empowered, right? And one of the reasons why you want to be, one of the reasons why you start businesses is because you want to be empowered, right? You know already from personal experience how important empowerment is because you left a steady paying job and struck out on your own, risking it all because you wanted to be empowered. That's how much you wanted it. That's how much everybody you work with wants it. Now think for a moment, would you work for yourself? Think about your style as a business owner or leader. Would you work for yourself? Just think about that. So that was the first guiding principle. Build a company you want to work for. Two, give people control over the destiny. Treat your coworkers as responsible professionals and adult humans because that's what they are. They want to collaborate with you. You want to collaborate with them. They are not children that you need to manage. Collaborating leads to mutual respect and in the knowledge industry what we do, people are extremely self-motivated. They're very self-reliant. They teach themselves new things every day. Everybody here taught themselves what they do. There really isn't an established college level program or anything like that for web designer development. We had to sit down and figure it out for ourselves. What's GitHub? Watch some videos. Read some how-tos. Go out and do it. That's how we learned. That's how we learned Drupal. So these people who have the self-motivation and the self-direction and this ability to teach themselves, well, they want the freedom of freelancing. Chances are many people who currently, with whom you currently work, used to be freelancers at some point, but they want the security of a full-time job. They have the personality and the desire of a freelancer, but they're looking for the security of a full-time job or to work with another team that inspires them. So you have to let them succeed or fail, just as you would allow yourself to succeed or fail. That's what it means to give people control over their destiny. And finally, trust, right? They didn't trust you. Make trust the center of your culture. Trust facilitates empowerment. You can't actually empower someone until you trust them. And they don't act on that empowerment until they trust you to let them succeed or fail. So own mistakes yourself, admit failure yourself, demonstrate through action the culture that you want to build. And finally, solve, don't blame. What happened? Let's figure out how to make sure that doesn't happen again. You still have to hold people accountable, but simply blaming somebody, that was Todd's fault. Well, nobody wins because now you've just, you made me feel terrible. You've made everybody else afraid that they're going to be called out in the carpet. Instead, you want to create a culture where myself, Todd, myself can stand up and say, yeah, that was my bad. I dropped the ball on that. And here's what I'm going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. That's really powerful, right? You want everybody to feel that way. So let's get tactical. Let's talk about how to actually do this. First and foremost, language, language, language. Language is everything. So language actually is thought. This is the example that I mentioned earlier about the culture of language. Common sense dictates that language exists because we have thoughts in our brain that need to get out and have to be communicated to other people. That's kind of when we think about language, you know, think about it for a moment. What does it mean? You know, why do we have language? Why is it a thing? Most people would land on that conclusion. And in fact, that had been thinking for, you know, hundreds of years within philosophy and then later psychology and then later on neurology. But in fact, linguists and neurologists in the last, I don't know, decade or so have discovered that individuals that do not possess language do not possess thought. Therefore, language is thought, not a representation of thought. Language rewires your brain to give you the power to form thoughts to begin with. Thoughts beyond hungry, angry, sad, cold. Without language, we're, we revert to a almost animal like state. There are countless examples of, you know, people who were, I don't know, found in a cave or, or, you know, twin sisters recently who had escaped into a forest and they had developed their own language between the two of them. This is the kind of thing that like you sort of see in like weird sci-fi or maybe in a cartoon or something, but it's, it's there because it's real. People want to develop language because they want to be able to think. It's part of it. It's just in our DNA. It's what we do. So because language is thought and because the brain is physically rewired, every time we make a memory or reach a new conclusion or learn a new pattern or a new idea, language is writing pathways, physical pathways in our brain. Actual neurons are branching out and attaching to one another based on the language we use every day. So think about how many times you say I instead of we, or when you use the dreadful word employee and think about what that means to people. What does it feel like to be called an employee or worse his or her employee? As if you're owned. That's not very empowering, right? You, you instantly like a little part, even if you like that person, a little part of you really resented that, right? Like, I could leave anytime I wanted to. You don't know me, right? They're not your employee. They're not an employee and they're certainly not your employee. It's your colleague, your teammate, your coworker. This kind of stuff is regarded as cheesy in the corporate world. You see them in these like, you know, aspirational posters where there's like a boat on still water and it says teamwork, you know, and why do we laugh at this stuff? We laugh at it because it's cynical because the people who put that stuff on their wall generally don't mean it. That's why we think it's stupid. But the underlying message is true and means something and is powerful. So let's take it back, right? We, not I, team, not employees, it physically changes the brain. Ask for input every day. I don't know where I heard this piece of advice, but it's fantastic. And it's something that people I work with have heard me say, I don't know how many dozens of times people want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with. So one more time, people want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with. They don't necessarily want you to agree with them, but they want their opinion, concerns, questions to be heard. Just getting something off your chest is really powerful and listening to somebody, really actually listening and confirming that. And even if you don't agree and you can say, thank you so much for that feedback, I really appreciate that you had the courage to come forward and say something about it. I don't agree with you and I don't agree with you for the following reasons, but I want to let you know that I take what you said to heart and I've heard you. And I might be wrong. And if I'm wrong, we'll try it and we'll figure that out and we'll fix it. Also, people talk a lot about open door policies. Open door policies are great. My door is always open. Come on in and we'll chat. It's one thing to have an open door policy. It's another to actually invite somebody inside. Set aside time that forces people to have a conversation, a real conversation. We're all very busy people and you as business owners and leaders, you are regarded as the busiest of busy people and nobody ever wants to bother you. That's just a true fact. So you might have a physical, literal open door or you may have, you know, an open chat room that you keep or whatever channels of communications that you keep open. But the fact is they won't really walk inside all that much because they don't want to bug you because they respect you and they like you or they're afraid of you, whatever it is, they're not going to actually talk to you unless you set aside time that is focused, that is one on one. So even in the creation of this presentation, I went to our team and I said, I asked, what does empowerment mean to you? How do we empower you? How do we not empower you? Even this presentation itself required input from everybody at the organization. Finally, oh, well, thank you. I've never gotten a clap on that line. I appreciate it. Thank you. And finally, when talking to somebody, ask questions that demand real answers. So how many of you have done check-ins that start with, and I've done this to poor Elia here, how many people have check-ins to start with? So how are you doing? I'm fine. How are things? They're okay. I mean, they're great. So you have to ask questions that make people stop and think. If you could change one thing about this organization right now, what would it be? You can't say, I'm okay, everything's fine to that. You're really asking, and people stop and think, so, hey, how are you doing? Oh, I'm fine. What are you most stressed out about right now? Oh, man, where do I start? And that immediately betrayed. They're not fine. They're stressed out. They're not okay. So ask questions that are really incisive. The three that I like to ask are, what are you most stressed out or worried about right now? What are you most excited about right now? And if you could change anything at this organization right now, what would it be? You can look at their list of these questions. People have written books upon books upon books about things like this, but those are the three that I really like to fall back on, and they're easy to remember. So you're asking for input, but you have to get that input through feedback channels. So you have to provide these feedback channels that are first and foremost accessible. People can actually get to them reliably like half an hour every two weeks. We're going to get on a video chat. We're going to talk. That's accessible. Or if you're hard to get a hold of because you live in a completely different time zone and you're plus 17 hours or whatever it is, that's not very accessible to people, right? You have to be easy to get a hold of. So that's accessible. Non-argumentative. Don't be defensive when getting feedback. Well, you know, I'm really having a problem with it. Well, they're like that because they're, you know, so don't, don't worry about it. Well, okay, you're arguing with them. Just let them say it, hear it, listen to it. And if they want an explanation, ask if they want one. And finally, genuine. This is a big one. You have to actually want this. If you don't really want feedback and you're not going to be good at this and you're not going to ask good questions and you're not going to have time to do it, it shouldn't be you doing this. You need to empower somebody else to handle all of this for you. If you're not genuine and your desire to do it, people pick up on that immediately because you're not acting on it. You're not attentive. You're not really in the zone. And you know what? That's okay. It doesn't have to be you that does all of this stuff, but somebody has to do this. This is important. So if you can't do it genuinely, find somebody else who can. Hire the right people, obviously, but think about some things during the onboarding or recruiting process. Do they share the same values as your organization? Do they share the same values as you as a person or your clients? There's something that I like to do called the airport test. I lifted this concept from Greg Knattison, who is a longtime droopler and he's somewhere around the conference today. The idea of the airport test is during an interview, imagine yourself stuck in an airport with this person for eight hours. How does that make you feel? It's kind of a tough one. So I wrote about this once. It was an interview for some magazine and I talked about the airport test. I was real proud of it and I was like, I got my name in the magazine and you know, talking about the airport test and that's pretty cool. And then I made the mistake of reading the internet comments. And very first comment said, sounds like this is a great excuse for discriminatory hiring practices. And you know what? They're right. They're right. I had to own that. That's true. The people that I'm going to get along with in an airport are going to be people like me. I don't know what exactly that means. I could guess, but you know what? They're right. And I didn't have an answer to that, except it made me think really long and hard about whether the airport test is actually something that I should be talking about. I'm going to throw that out there because I don't have an answer, but I want you to know that not everybody's right all the time and that hiring the right people doesn't necessarily mean people like you, however you choose to define that. But I think there's some truth to that. I do believe in like deliberate diversity, but that wasn't what I meant by it, but I'm just, I have to own that. That's true. Another concept everybody talks about, slow to hire, fast to fire. Just do it. Take your time hiring people. Make sure they're a good choice. As soon as you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach, like, oh, this just, every time I've gotten that three months later, I think back to that moment, I'm like, I should have, I just should have done something then. You know, you really have to do that. And there's this sort of moment like those of you who have, you know, dated recently or you're meeting somebody and then there's just like that moment where they say something or they do something and you're just like, oh, nope. Like how do I, no, no, no, no, this isn't going to work. This is weird. It's that kind of thing. You know, pay attention to that gut. Your gut is really powerful. Your gut is there for a reason. Pay attention to it. And finally, absolutely hire people who are smarter and better than you, smarter and better than you all the time. I'm going to, I'm going to come back to that point a little bit later because that's a really key one that expresses itself in a lot of interesting ways. This one's going to be tough for some people. Go virtual. Some people call it remote. Some people call it distributed. Big one. How many of you have offices and most people in an office? Okay. Imagine that office going away. It's tough, right? At first you're like, can't do it. Nope. No way. That's impossible. We did it. We did it two years ago. It's one of the best things we ever did. We still have an office and we're trying to get rid of it now. We have an office that fits 25 people and on a given day, there may be four or five people there. We need, it's just, it's an albatross. We need it gone. This is why it empowers your team. It gives them the flexibility to work from home or anywhere. I want to go spend a month in the Bahamas and I'm going to work. They can do that now. Whoa. Hey, even better yet, you can all go work from the Bahamas for a month, right? Just think about that for a moment. How cool that would be. I've always wanted to sell my house and buy an RV and drive around the country and just be a nomad. You can do this. This is within your grasp. This is doable. It's going to require a major, major cultural change. There will be people who do not like this. There will be people who leave. But ultimately, a team is more empowered when they are distributed virtual remote. Hand in hand, let them set their own schedules to whatever degree possible. Some people call this flexible work schedules or maybe you, you have people all over the world in different time zones, but you've decided on having a certain set of hours that overlap and those are your core work hours and that's when you touch base. This is doable. You can think creatively. You can make it happen. Additionally, it's not just how people work on a Monday through Friday schedule, but it's how they work throughout the year. We have something called an open vacation policy. You can take as much vacation as you want whenever you want it for however long you want. Oh, well, then what's going to stop them from just going on vacation as soon as you hire them and then they never show up ever again? Well, then you fire them, right? Because they're abusing the policy. And if they're abusing the policy, they're not the right fit for your team because they're not responsible adults. This is a test. This is a test. Are they responsible adults or not? If they are, they can do this like responsible adults. Other valid criticism of the open vacation policy. Well, isn't that just going to mean that everybody's going to start competing over how little vacation they can take? Because if you haven't set a number, how does anybody know what the expectation is? They're right. They're absolutely right. We put this policy in place five or six years ago. That's a problem. Vacation time went down. It went down. So we are now probably on the cusp of instituting a minimum vacation policy. You must take a certain number of days every year. My one criticism to that policy was, well, once you say the minimum, the minimum is the maximum. Now you have a number and that's it. And we're back to where we started. The thing is, and we've gone back and forth. We actually, we track things like this and GitHub issues. We do all of our internal, like, I want this policy changed. Kind of the file a ticket in GitHub. It's the four kitchens management project in GitHub. And you file a ticket and you have a discussion. And this discussion is huge. And it's philosophical. And it talks, you know, the thing is every policy is going to piss somebody off. No matter what you do. There is, and especially when it comes to vacation, there's no answer because everybody has a different working style. Some people want an expectation. Some people don't. So you have to figure out what's the happy medium is and then expose everybody to the conversation so they know where everybody else is coming from and you engender empathy. Invest time and money in your team success. Professional development budget. Set one. Give people money to go to conferences. Give people money to learn things. Give people money to network to buy books, to get equipment they need to subscribe to services and try them out. How many people here have had somebody come to them and say, Hey, we should try this, whatever service I need to put down a credit card. It's $5 a month, but like, and you're like, well, let me go get this expense approved. Just let them give them a debit card with money on it and they can buy it. You know, they want to try out this tool. That tool might change your business, but you put all these blockers in the way. Well, I got to get this reimbursed. I don't want it on my card and somebody who has a company card, right tear that stuff down, give them access to funds. Put a limit on it, obviously, but give them access to stuff to use. They want to be better at their job. Facilitate that. This one's especially unnerving to some folks. Encourage personal brands. This is one of those like rising tide lifts all boats kinds of things, right? The better your individual teammates are, the more well known they are, the better your organization is going to be. The more sought out your organization will be overall because you are affiliated with these great people who are widely known. Yes, sir. Yeah, it's kind of, it's, it's more like a bunch of boats rises the tide. I don't quite know how. Yes, exactly. You put a bunch of boats in the bathtub and then the water level goes, I'll go with that one. Yeah, exactly. So good point. Thank you. I deserve to be called out on that. A lot of people hear something like this and they go, Oh, but if they're too good, they're going to leave. Oh, well, then there's something wrong with your organization or you just haven't set yourself realistic expectations. The fact is everybody is going to leave. They are going to get married and have kids. They are going to retire. They're going to die. Everybody leaves their job. You too will leave your job someday. So don't think about, well, they're going to leave. If I do this, they're going to leave no matter what someday. Wouldn't you rather they leave on terms that are positive for everybody else that they leave an organization that feels like you did everything you could to encourage them to grow and get better. And by the time they decide that, well, I want to do, I'm so good at what I do now. I want to go do bigger and better things and your organization to simply isn't supplying them and that's okay. Let them go because then they're going to leave happy instead of feeling like they've been suffocated and then they suddenly like were set free that they had this epiphany of like, I got to get out of there. And then suddenly they're very happy to leave. Wouldn't you rather be happy about the time they spent there than happiest about the last day at the job? Encourage those personal brands. Everybody's going to leave at some point. Don't let that stop you. Consider adopting agile methodologies. Scrum, Kanban, whatever you want to do. It allows teams to self organize around projects and problems. And self organizing teams are empowered teams. They get to decide what they're doing and when and all of that. And this is not a project management session, so I'm not going to get into it, but think about it because this engenders empowerment. Don't tell people how to do things. Set goals. Hey, by the end of the year, we need to have at least two people on our team that are really good at node. Okay, you don't have to tell people how to do that. If they're good at their jobs, they're going to make that happen. They're going to figure out the conferences you got to go to and the skills we need to develop and the projects you go after and all of that. Set goals, explain why that's a goal, why it's important, why everybody benefits. Let them decide. Telling people how to do things is micromanaging, right? Nobody likes that. Also, the tech and the tools that your team uses should be determined by them, you know, whether you're using Trello or GitHub issues or Jira or whatever issue tracking you use or whatever time tracking solution you use. Let the team decide that. They're the ones using it, generally not you, right? Let them pick the tools that work best for them. We switched from, in the course of the year, IRC to hip chat to Slack because we tried something, didn't like it, tried something else, didn't like it, tried something else. Hey, this works for now. A year from now, it might be something different. So what? The team loves it. How many people hate hearing people gripe about the tools you're using, right? Like, just, okay, change them. Just change them. Next project, change them. Done. Easy. Push people, set boundaries beyond what the person currently feels. Some people take power. They're like, oh, I want to do this. I'm going to go do this. Awesome. Like, those people are great, right? They're so much fun because they just do things and you're just so proud of them. And that's awesome. But some people need a little bit of a nudge. Some people need to be given that power. And at first, they're going to be resistant to that. They're going to say, like, I don't think I can do this, or I don't really know if I have time. Well, then you say, what do I need to do to free up your schedule to make this happen? What do you need to learn in order to be able to do this? And that's a habit that some people have to learn. Most people had to learn to take initiative. So you're in a position to help teach that. Accept that your team knows more about your work than you do. They're the ones actually doing it. I haven't personally touched code or design in about three years now. Everybody else at the organization, basically, knows more about the work that Four Kitchens does than I do. I have a different kind of job now. I not only accept that, I relish that. So they're deciding what we do. They decide what technologies we invest in. I listen to them, I listen to our clients, and we set the goals together. And finally, this is a practice. This is a practice like any other kind of practice. A musical instrument, yoga, meditation, whatever it is you're doing, you have to constantly exemplify, pursue, and praise it. Reinforce it. Regular conversations about what empowerment has done, how people have benefited from it. And one note, and I'm not quite sure where to fit this, but it's somewhere in this bucket. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. You as business owners asking for help to make these changes is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of empowerment. People feel empowered to say, I can't do this. I need help with this. The bravery it takes, we forget this as leaders and business owners. We forget what it's like to need help and feel afraid to ask for it. Because it's like, if I ask for help, then they're going to know that I'm an imposter, that I can't do this, and then like my cover is blown and I'm going to get fired. If they're asking for help, it means that they really respect you and like you. Own that, appreciate that. So empowerment really changes everything. It changes everything about an organization, about a person, about any level of culture. And when empowered, a person benefits the company, not the other way around. What I mean by that is, in the traditional working world, we have this model where the company is the thing that gives everything to a person. The company is giving me my salary. I get my benefits from the company. I get my 401k from the company. So this is the model that a lot of people think of. The company is this entity, this benevolent entity that is bestowing on me all the things that I'm so lucky to have. Income, professional development, career growth, social groups, all of that is given to them by the company. It's the opposite. When a person is empowered, they benefit the company. The company owes everything to the people in it. 100%. They control the own destiny, their own destiny, and the destiny of the company. So again, empowerment makes everyone happier and better at their jobs. Teams experienced increased productivity, quality, retention. Clients see an increase in the quality of work because everyone's happier and everyone can help them solve their problems. And it's less work for the leadership because business managers and owners can now focus on long-term goals. They can plan instead of react. We have just a couple of moments for questions, so I can maybe take just a couple. Yes, sir. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, let me repeat it for the recording. So you flip the idea of the airport test to be instead of, can you as a teammate be stuck in an airport for eight hours with this person? Instead you think, could our client stand to be stuck? Would we want our client to be stuck in an airport? Well, hopefully, I assume we wouldn't want any client to be stuck in an airport, but I understand what you mean. I like that a lot. I think that's a better way to put it. We are, after all, in the business of client service, and that's not discriminatory. Well, maybe somebody would think it is. I don't know. I'm sorry. There's a troll who would say, I'm sure, I'm sure somewhere. Yes, sir. Absolutely. Okay, great question. So for a remote company, how do you deal with the social aspects? Admittedly, we are still in a transitionary phase. There still is a physical office, and there is a break room, and there is a CAG, and all of that stuff, right? But there are only about four to five people there on any given day. I can tell you my own personal experiences, and I think that part of what makes one of the ways in which you replace that social interaction is that it's different for everybody, and everybody kind of creates their own thing. So here's my experience with it. I've seen on Slack that we have lots of topics channels, like people who are really into, there are multiple people who are into racing, like autocross and things like that. So there's like a racing channel that people can go, you know, share photos and time trials and whatever. There's a gaming group. So there's board gaming, desktop gaming, video gaming, probably about two or three times a week, I get on a team fortress server with, you know, there's Aaron in the back there, and two of my colleagues next door, Matt and John, they, we all play team fortress. We'll do, you know, man versus machine, the player versus, or the co-op mode, and that's a lot of fun because you've got your headsets on, and you've been doing video chat all day, and now you're like strategizing, you know, about like, how are we going to defeat the robots and all of that. So you find ways to still, to be remote together. We'll have, we kind of actually do like a happy hour kind of thing where there's just a point at which we open up a video channel, and people can just kind of walk in or not, or I mean walk in, join or not, and maybe you're drinking a beer, maybe you're having coffee, whatever you're doing, but you just kind of sit around and chat, and it's on in the background, you may still be working on this screen, but you've got this screen over here with video, and it's sort of like a campfire kind of field, but you can go in or out, or if you need to focus on stuff, you can, you know, go focus on things. So that is the, I get that question all the time. That was my first question when, when we decided to do this, like, how are we going to maintain a vibrant social culture within our organization? You have to think of it like this. You're going to lose the thing you had, and you're going to gain something new and different. Yes? Elia, here's the, yeah, now you're on the mic. Um, one of the great things about having a remote team is that now I have friends everywhere I go. So we come out here to California, we have a couple of teammates out here, and it's exciting to see them because I don't get to see them every day. So it brings a new excitement to our team dynamic, I think. Well, thank you everybody. I see there are a lot of questions. Please come up. I'd love to talk about this. This is something I'm very passionate about. Unfortunately, we have to clear out the room for the next session. Thank you so much for attending. I really appreciate it. And by the way, if you want to stick around and watch one of my colleagues actually perform a musical about content APIs, I'm not kidding. He wrote a musical. It's happening in this room immediately after this. And there's a boff tomorrow for remote workers. There's also, for people who are really interested in remote work, I'll just feel free to, there's an event called Yonder, and it's run by Lullabot. It's a conference for distributed companies. Right now on aquee.com slash podcasts. There are two podcasts with Todd's remote teams talking about how to succeed at that. And another podcast with an aquee remote team. Thank you again, everybody.