 And welcome to Work Reimagined, streaming live on Pink Tech Hawaii and brought to you from Honolulu, Hawaii. Why do we need to reimagine work? As we're seeing, there are so many massive disruptions to our labor markets due to automation, of course, now with the pandemic. So we're asking ourselves questions like, what is work gonna look like when we return to some type of normal after the pandemic? And then how will automation affect the kinds of skills that we will need as workers for the jobs of the future? On Work Reimagined, I talked to innovators and entrepreneurs who are creating innovative solutions that are helping us navigate these effects of these massive disruptions while making a positive social impact in people's lives. I'm Ruby Menon, your host. And my guest today is Liza Rodewald, and she is the CEO and founder of Instant Teams. And they provide an on-demand remote workforce using an untapped source of professionals. Now, who is that, you might ask? Well, she has tapped into military spouses. So I'll be talking to Liza about her journey and what motivated her to create a remote work opportunity company for military spouses and at the same time providing employers with these on-demand teams for different types of positions. The company is growing and Liza has big plans. So we'll have a chat about where she's headed with her company. And with these rapid changes happening in our labor markets, I believe we can expect to see more of this future of work model. So Liza, I'm so excited to have you on ThinkTech, Hawaii and Work Reimagined and wanted to say welcome and Aloha. Aloha Ruby, and thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to just talk about the journey and to share a little bit. Yeah, you know, I remember the first time I saw you when you were with the Blue Startups organization or the accelerator and you did a pitch at the Dema Day. And I have to say that I was so impressed at that time when I saw you. Well, number one, you were doing something that was very unique along, you know, I mean, all the pitches were great. However, what you were trying to tackle was so different. Like everybody else was doing something maybe around, you know, advertising and marketing analytics and things like that. And you were tackling this HR issue and I have an HR background. So I could completely understand where you were going with this. And so I've kind of been tracking you and, you know, watching what you're doing and, you know, I had the opportunity to do this show. You came up on my radar, because I was thinking we've got to talk because you've kind of like cracked, I think it sounds like you cracked the code on creating these teams and cracked the code on how you can make this work remotely. And this is such a huge topic for us right now where employers are really trying to wrap their head around the whole issue of remote work and how do you gel the teams and all of that. So I'm excited to get into all of those different conversations, but let's start out with you and your career journey. Like what led you to this moment with Instant Teams? Sure. So, you know, I have a long history of working remotely myself as both an employee, a contractor and an entrepreneur. So Instant Teams is my fourth company. I have a software engineering background and so I built a lot of software for the government, healthcare agencies, things like that. And in the journey of running my own companies, I saw the need for the technology piece of what Instant Teams does for a sourcing solution to get high quality talent, be able to scale up a team quickly to deploy on the projects I was doing for software space in the government world. And then at the same time I met my husband, he was active duty military before then he was in the reserves. And when he was in the reserves, that's when we got married and he decided he wanted to go back active duty like I think of like four months after we got married. And so I was like, well, my company at the time was completely distributed, the one before Instant Teams. So I was like, sure, let's go on an adventure. And I moved into my first predominantly military neighborhood and had always had this idea for Instant Teams. In fact, I bought the domain like 10 years ago, a long time ago. I had this idea on the technology side and then every single spouse I would meet would come up to me and say, Liza, how are you working from home? How can I get a job working remotely? I've been unemployed for the past X number of years because they move on average every two degree years. But highly skilled, highly capable, have a lot of great soft skills that translate good into the remote workspace. And so I just started thinking, okay, I know there's a big business need here for high quality scalable remote team. Now I've been introduced to a completely untapped talent resource of these military spouses who need these remote work opportunities. How do I bring these two things together and create something that solves problems on both sides? And that's kind of how Instant Teams was born and how we started iterating on creating the solution. So I know that you, and I have to say that when I used to hire military spouses, they were always so talented, very professional. And the only thing though, that was always a little bit in the back of our minds as employers is we knew that we only had them for a limited amount of time, because it all depended on the tour of duty. So I was very curious about this Instant Team concept because as leaders, we're always grappling with team dynamics. How do you get the best people on the bus? How do you get them to work together and align on the mission or whatever the project goals or values are? And the notion of creating an Instant Team is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around only because I've been there where I've tried to gel teams and it's like you have to have a lot of FaceTime with them. So how does that Instant piece kind of work? How do you make that work with this instant timeframe that you're doing? Sure, so Instant Teams builds teams on average for five to seven days for a company. But there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes prior to that working. So we have like four layers of vetting that spouses go through before they're even available to be matched to the company. And so there's some pieces of that assessment and personality testing and things that we do in automation and our software platform prior to them being matched to the team. And what we're doing is gathering data on not only like skill-based matching but personality, soft skills. Like what is it that's really making these team members be successful with the companies we're pairing them with? And how can we learn from that and model that so that we can put it back into the technology to make sure that as much as we can we're automating that process at scale. Oh, that's fascinating. So you're using, is it artificial intelligence or machine learning or what type of technology are you using for that? We have plans to start going into some AI but we're just using our own datasets right now to gather as much of that data as possible so we can start to build the models for it. Oh, cool, okay. So you're talking about matching people to projects. So I was curious as to how, so you're gathering all this data there and I looked at your website, I guess they're doing like a digital profile, right? And then you're from there being trying to match them. So if you're a job seeker and you want to, oh, first of all, do you have to be a military spouse or can you be just anybody? Is that one of the criteria? Yeah, you can be just anybody. We do have a focus and mission to help military spouses and military spouse employment but we have civilians and veterans and all kinds of demographics within our town. Okay. So if I'm coming on your website and clicking on join your team, what's the experience? Like what could I expect in order to be able to get my foot in the door? Yeah, so you would fill out a profile, what we just call an RD profile. It has several different steps in it. So it'd be like a basic resume, online resume type system where we'd have you enter your backgrounds, your skills, your education, that type of thing. And then once all that information is completed, then it'll go through some of our automation skills matching to see that the things that you wrote and put in there kind of match the rest of your profile and at that point you get invited to some automated video interviews. So based on which buckets you've been placed as potential role opportunities. So we kind of segregate things into like customer support and customer success, operational teams, project managers, that kind of thing. So you'll get kind of put in a bucket based on your assessment. And then you'll do the automated interview process. Our HR team watches all of them. So we do touch every application that comes in in some form. And then they will score that. And then the final level is called remote pro. Once you reach remote pro status, you're available to be matched to a company coming in and asking for certain skill sets and things for instance. So you'll be notified all along the way where you're at in the journey, what else you need to do to move to the next steps. And then sometimes bigger companies will have an additional assessment or something they'll want you to take in addition prior to starting them. So at that point we may send you a personality test or a skill-based test depending on the job or the role. And then that would be the last layer before you get to actually what we call an intro view, which is like a meet and greet. So it's not interview process because we do all of that, but it's just a meet and greet with the customer to make sure that it's a good fit and then you get onboarded. And about how long does that take, that process take, would you say? It can go really quickly. So as long as you're on top of your game and you're doing all the things to progress, you can get it done within a week. Oh, okay. So you're mentioning the types of positions, customer service and a few others. What skill sets are you looking for in terms of the types of positions that you have available? Well, we saw a really huge need in the customer service industry, especially with the fits of our talent. So we didn't necessarily start off to focus there, but it became pretty apparent that we had the ability to have US citizens that were located around the globe and in every time zone, which made it very easy for us to do 24-7 support for companies and everybody kind of worked during the day. That became a really huge value problem in some teams and a lot of big enterprise were very interested in that. So we doubled down and kind of focused on customer support and tech support in all kinds of roles, right? So there's tier one, two, three, managers, supervisors, things like that. So it's not just entry level, but within that framework. So we really, three main things, customer success, customer support. We do operational support-based teams, so project managers, data entry, back office type things. And then we have some telemedicine teams that do virtual thriving and virtual receptions work for medical companies and for the Air Force in particular. Wow, that's, so it sounds like, yeah, because a lot of times I think that, you know, people think that it's just very, that the lower end data entry types of jobs that, you know, or I guess at some point, they're easy to get your foot in the door, but they don't have much career progression I guess now. Yeah, so let's say that you come into that position. Well, it's interesting that you're saying that there's a huge demand for customer service. And I'm probably gonna use this as a segue because, you know, with the pandemic, obviously Hawaii got hit so hard, you know, with our hospitality industry going into the tubes. And there's so many people who have hospitality skills that I think is a very transferable skill that they are able to put into a customer service. Cause it's like, if a person was like at a hotel desk, concierge type of person chances are they've got the kinds of customer service skills that you would need. They would just have to translate it maybe to being on the phone, on a computer or whatever. So I know there's a cool project that you're doing with the state of Hawaii. So why don't you tell us about that, what you're doing with them? Sure, yeah. I definitely saw the same need, right? Hospitality does translate really well into customer service. I started actually being part of a group that's all about digital equity here in Hawaii and making sure broadband is available to the outer islands and things like that. And those discussions got me leading to kind of iterating on some ideas that I had and how Instant Teams could help Hawaii and retrain some people that maybe were in hospitality and displaced and put them in jobs, just like we did for the military spouses. So taking that same model and bringing it here to Hawaii. So through that group that I was a part of, I got interviews to DBET and we started talking about how we can maybe do an initiative, a pilot together when the state to offer some training and some re-skilling and then put some people here into some of the jobs that Instant Teams have with some of our large enterprise such as Walmart and the Air Force contract and the different things that we have going on. So we have what we call Remote Ready Hawaii. If you wanna find out more about it, you can go to instantteens.com slash Hawaii so you can read the details. But the overall idea is that we're building a program here so that people can upskill, reskill short micro. So we're not talking about going to college and getting a big certification. It's all about short skills that can get you into a job fast. And so we're doing micro-type training and a paid internship and then straight into remote jobs for Instant Teams. So we have kicked that off this month which is our first cohort starting to go through which is very exciting with the state. And in conjunction with that, we're building a sales team with an Instant Teams to go out and reach some other countries that we think the time zone here in Hawaii is a selling point for. And so we're building an internal sales team here in Hawaii to start going after some of those countries that might want the bilingual nature and the intermediate time zone in between East Coast time and times over in Japan or Korea, Australia, these types of companies who need kind of that bridge gap. So we're really excited to take this model we've seen successful with military spouses and open it up to appear to the local people in Hawaii. And how many people do you have in your cohort? There are 88 spots in the pilot. Oh, okay. And the pilot is going to last how long? Until June. So all 88 will be have gone through the training and into the jobs by the end of June this year. And we are working to prove the success of the pilot so that we can extend it and start offering it to more and more people here. So you were mentioning that you work with companies like Walmart or the Air Force of what types of businesses? Because I'm really interested and we were talked about one side of the labor market which is the town pipeline, but on the other side are the employers. So I was curious to find out if, well, what is your observation of the employers? Because this is a different model, people. It's like the pandemic kind of 100 X the whole remote thing because at first, it's always been looked at as it's a perk especially in tech companies. You either have to prove that you're trustworthy before you're given the keys to the kingdom which is like working from home type of thing. And now out of necessity, employers had to go, well, whatever. I mean, we can only conduct business if we're doing with this remote. So I was curious to find out, are you finding that that paradigm is shifting and will continue to sustain after our pandemic COVID stuff is over? What are you seeing in the market? Yeah, most definitely. So a lot of our customers pre-COVID were involved in technology in some sort. So technology based type companies, SaaS based companies, tech-enabled service type companies because they're early adopters to remote workforces, right? It's not really not used them to utilize a distributed workforce for different reasons. And I would say like sometimes our number one objection to working with companies prior was like, I don't know if I really want these people remote. I think I'd prefer to have them on site but I might be open to it. And then of course after the pandemic, it's like, okay, well, everybody's remote no matter what we've got to still keep moving. So it just, I would say 10 years sped up that adoption that was already starting to happen. So we saw industries like healthcare that have been wanting to move to the model but were just slow to kind of adapt, have to change and adapt overnight. Banking, like a lot of industries that were concerned of security had to figure those things out. So they spent the first half of the pandemic figuring out, okay, how do we secure everyone working from home? How do we put those things in place? And then after they did that process, now they're ready to scale their remote workforce. So I think overall those slower to adapt and change industries that just because they've been around and had older technology systems and things, it's sped that adoption up like government, I mean, just so fast. So it just opened doors really for us as an instant teams and areas that we might not have targeted pre-COVID. That would have been a harder sell and maybe a longer adoption to where they were just like, hey, we need help. All of our people are working from home. We're ready to engage with you guys and figure out what the best practices are and how to make this successful. Wow. Now speaking of security, I mean, that's obviously, and if you're dealing with insurance, healthcare, banking, I mean, those have to be airtight, right? So from the person who's working with instant teams, do they have to come with their own computer or is the equipment provided or how does that model work? Yeah, we have both scenarios. So it depends on the company. So some companies will wanna send a secured laptop that connects to a very specific VPN and has no ability to connect to anything else for security reasons. And then we have other customers where they'll use their own device and we've set up remote desktops through like an AWS to create secure protocols that way. So it just really depends on the customer and how, at what level they wanna do it, but some of our team members get equipment issued to them and some of them bring your own. So I wanted to kind of get back into this team thing. So you were mentioning that you'll select a group of people to form this team. And did you say that they would be working on a project for maybe five days or so or is it longer term? What's the use of the term? Most of our teams are full time, 40 hour a week. We have some going on two years working. Oh, oh, oh, oh. They are much more longer term hires and teams for the company. We build them in five to seven days, but they last a long time. Oh, got it, okay. So if you get placed in a team, do you wind up working with the same group of people? Like are you in a cohort or is it constantly changing and people coming in and out and how does that? Yeah, you work with the same team. The team may grow, we may add in new people, but yes, they're all in like Slack channels together. They all have community cohorts together, which is part of what makes instant teams work so well as we've built like a soft, strong sense of community within each other. So they have their own meetings together. They are cohesive in teams together and then we just add more to them or somebody does leave, somebody else gets replaced. They all have team leaders and supervisors and a whole virtual structure built around them to help give them support. So the virtual structure of the team leaders, are they part of that team or are they part of your group that's coming in and leading? They're part of our group. So everyone is employed through instant teams. So W2 employees, we don't do hardly any 1099s we're mostly W2, I'd say 98% are W2s with instant teams and the team leaders may work on the customer account maybe like 10 or 20 hours a week and then work the rest of the hours for instant teams as the team leads. Sometimes we split their time so they can kind of be in the weeds and really understand the job and what's going on with the other team members and then also they usually split their time like that. Ah, I see. And how many people are working in instant teams not as a remote team, instant team worker in your company? How many do you have so far? I think we've got 42 that work well on teams on what we call instant team headquarters which is everywhere, all over the world. Yes, we have team members in Japan and here and in Hawaii and all across the United States. So we're all completely distributed but there's about 42 that work in our headquarters and the rest of the team members are deployed to customer accounts. Okay, and then how many people do you have in your talent pipeline that you would say are like ready to just get deployed into a project? We have 15,000 people registered in the team's platform at various stages. I would say there's probably 7,500 at remote pro and the rest of them are making their way there. Oh, wow. Now you're saying that the teams are, you're helping them to build communities through Slack and different things like that. Because you've been working as a distributed company and I know that this is something that I think a lot of employers are still trying to figure out like how do I gel my teams? What have you found works really well to make people even though they're not face to face, feel like they're part of a team, get that sense of belonging and feel valued, all the soft stuff that we have a hard time, the squishy stuff that we have a hard time trying to wrap our heads around. How do you kind of engender that feeling for them? Yeah, so we have very specific culture building programming that we've built out. So not only are they just in a Slack channel together but there's programming that goes to them on a daily, on a weekly basis that promotes engagement with each other, engagement with instant teams, engagement and maybe additional content that we're bringing in. It could be additional training, it could be a donut and coffee morning, it changes but there's very intentional programming that we have that all of our team members get within their Slack channel. So their team leader will publish this content, will drive interaction to make sure that everyone's participating and feels connected and part of something. The other thing that we have is an anonymous feedback tool that we've looped in to Slack, which prompts people to really share how they feel. And so if people start feeling disconnected then we dig into that. Okay, why? What could help asking questions? And I think having those anonymous feedback tools are really important in a distributed environment because people won't always tell you or come to you and say, hey, Liza, I'm struggling but they might send you an anonymous message or a message even that has their name on it that says, I don't wanna bother anyone but I'm really feeling disconnected from the team. I would love to see X, Y, Z, right? And we get so much great feedback through there and we're able to just take that feedback and then implement improvements. Wow, that's really that, cause I mean that takes a lot of trust, right? To be able to put yourself out there and say, hey, I feel like I'm not quite engaged here and help, I'm out here by myself. And that takes a lot of trust and courage. So that's kudos to you to be able to make sure that especially in a distributed environment for giving people that opportunity to say how they really feel. The other thing I wanted to ask you about when I was looking at your website is that you have like a whole set of remote courses that you offer. Can you tell us a little more about that? Sure, so what we found when we started building teams is we had a wide variety of people that had different types of experience levels and maybe more traditional careers. So they may have been in-person but they're not familiar with all of the tools we use like on Zoom right now in Slack, email, calendar integration, things that they may not have had to use in an office environment. So we saw a gap there. And we decided, you know, part of our process would be to have a workforce development piece within Instant Team so people could get what we call like digital readiness. So we've got a digital readiness bootcamp that basically just shows you the best parts of Slack, Gmail, calendar integration, shortcuts, how to use an online project management tool, right? Just things that they might not have had an introduction to as they have never worked remotely. And then that leads into some more advanced type skills that training that we have in those remote work areas including remote leadership. We have some remote leadership courses. And then we have some very specific industry. So customer support type training that they can take. And then any kind of training like I said that some of these bigger enterprises want to integrate within their talent pipelines as well. And the, so once you're part of Instant Teams is that something that you just have access to and you can take on your own time or do you have to pay for it or how's it all? Yeah, so some of them are free like the basic general level ones like digital readiness boot camps, those are all free. Once you've got a profile in Instant Teams you have access to our workforce development programs. And then some of them are paid for some of the more advanced ones and some of them are paid for by companies. If they want you to take the course in order to come into their talent funnel then they will pay for some of the training too. So there's kind of a hybrid approach. Oh wow, okay. Well, oh my gosh, I could talk to you for so much so I have so many questions but let's wrap up with maybe you can tell people how they can find you. Do you have social media and website and all of that? Sure, well, you can find me on LinkedIn at Liza Rotowald, L-I-Z-A-R-O-D-E-W-A-L-D. That's my personal page. I post a lot of things on there. And then of course, instantteens.com our regular website. If you wanna find out about what we're doing specifically for Hawaii, instantteens.com slash Hawaii and it has all that information. And then you can find the instantteens on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, all just under instantteens. Awesome, awesome. Well Liza, thank you so much. This has just really been enlightening and I wish you the best of luck. I know that you're transitioning to North Carolina but obviously because you're working remote that's not gonna cramp your style at all. Yeah, that was the life of military spouse. Yes, so thank you so much for joining me and thank you for sharing your journey and all the cool stuff that you're doing with instantteens. And thank you listeners for joining in and please tune in on Wednesday, April 7th at 3 p.m. where I'll be featuring somebody else that you'll be able to have a better understanding of what's going on with the future of work. Until next time, be safe, take care of one another and aloha.