 It's a delight to welcome Daniel Pupias, CEO and co-founder at Range. His session is entitled Stronger Remote Cultures, Rethinking the Workweek. Understanding the phases of this transition and how it impacts the culture of an organization is critical to developing a successful remote workforce. Daniel, thank you for sharing your genius with us. Take it away. Hi there. My name is Dan. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Range. We're really excited to be part of GitLab Commit. When I worked at companies like Google and Medium, I started to focus on the question of why the more humans you add to a company, the less human they become, and this led me on a journey to start Range. We make team effectiveness software that keeps remote teams productive, focused, and connected. I'm Nick. I'm the CMO at Range, and our pre-zo is more of a conversation about how rethinking your workweek can help your remote team work better, especially during this uniquely challenging time. In the age of COVID, we at Range, and I think everybody I've been talking to, has really had to step back and understand how we can better work together. We really started also re-evaluating the workweek itself. I know you, Dan, have done a lot of thinking about this, and a good place to start maybe exactly how did the 95 workweek, the modern workweek, we're all used to come about? I think it started about 100 years ago. The workweek, as we know, it was designed by Henry Ford in the 20s. 20 hours at Breedy Balloons during the Industrial Revolution, and he identified that reducing the amount of hours in the days that people worked actually increased efficiency. Prior to industrialization, it was pretty common for half a day to be considered a full workday, and people worked around 1,500 hours a year. Then with the Industrial Revolution, it was all about efficiency and repeatable small units of work, and the workweek doubled almost more than doubled to 3,500 hours, which is around 60 hours a week. Even with Ford's reduced workweek, it was still about industrial processes. They were building cars, and it was predominantly manual labor. It's strange to me that we consider 95 such a standard when something has changed. If you look at the workweek as a technology, it's incredibly anachronistic. We do it that way because we've been always doing it that way. It's updated, it's not optimized, and we're not working in factories anymore. I think many of the things that made sense back then obviously no longer make sense. The people at this conference are knowledge workers. The work is novel and creative, and from a management perspective, the idea that employees are working because they're at work, it might be comforting, but it's really short-sighted. Organizations that limit flexibility end up creating these low-trust working environments, and it just plainly isn't the best way to get the most out of people. It's not the best way to get the best work, the highest quality work, and the highest output. We talk a lot about high-trust working environments, and what are some ways in which knowledge work is different, especially when you think of a healthy, balanced environment where you can balance well-being and performance? Creative work is really about focused attention, and when you look at the studies, people have a really hard time focusing for more than two hours. Really, the optimal time is one hour on with 15 minutes off. Thinking that you can plow through a nine-to-five and be effective is not a great idea, and will actually end up leaving you feeling depleted. That's one aspect. The other aspect is unnatural energy levels. Some people might have heard of the idea of larks and owls, or your morning person and evening person. Different people actually have melatonin levels that fluctuate at different rates and different sequences. This is your circadian rhythm, and these rhythms affect how you can focus and how you can problem-solve. So, larks peak in the morning, owls peak in the evening, and for those of you listening, you can figure out what you are. Where do you naturally want to wake up in the morning, and when do you naturally want to go to sleep at night? And if you find the midpoint, that will help you determine if you're a lark or an owl. If it's before 3.30, you're a lark. If it's after 5.30, you're an owl, and I guess they couldn't come up with the third bird name, but the middle area is called the third bird. So, if you're an owl, like going to a 9am meeting, you're really not going to be the top of your game. It's going to be pretty tough for you. Really, you're going to be wanting to do creative brainstorming work in the late afternoon. And what the study shows that during the trough period, which for most people is the early afternoon, more accidents happen. Doctors forget to wash their hands, for instance, and people are less creative. If you ask people to spot a fake coin, they're less likely to spot the fake coin during that time. Yeah, I remember reading actually how judges will make different decisions on the same type of cases in the morning versus the afternoon. And I mean, even in the best of times, 95 can be really tough. Obviously, Dolly Parton pointed that out. And during COVID, it's untenable. What are the key shifts that we're seeing in the modern world and this kind of strange new normal? Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of people talk about this new normal being an explosion of remote work. So, let's first stop that and acknowledge that this isn't normal remote work. This is work from home during a global pandemic and things are very different. Many of us are working from home with kids. I'm kind of half expecting mine to jump in the background at some point or the baby's start crying. And there's a lot of tumult in society. So, this is really, it's a cliche now, but it's unprecedented times. But at the same time, this period has really accelerated trends that are already underway. And obviously, GitLab knows this better than most. Remote work is becoming increasingly common. And even for organizations that weren't really remote or acknowledging the hybrid situation, hybrid was the new normal. People weren't always in the office at the same time. They were traveling, working from home, working from the coffee shop. So, a lot has changed. And I think what the last few months have done is they've shone a light on how we work and how we communicate. And it's really a microscope. And it's kind of funny for me because Fringy org design topics that were once in random Slack groups and our common conversations on Twitter or even on NPR, I had like asynchronous communication was on NPR yesterday morning when I took my daughter to the dentist. Yeah, it is amazing how one, there's the vocabulary and the nomenclature. I mean, GitLab obviously is fluent in this and everybody else is gaining fluency. I mean, we were remote first to begin with. We had one day, we'd all work from Monroe. We'd have remote teammates. So we had kind of the practice down. But I remember when we shifted to quarantine and we were all really trying to figure out with all the changes to the kids at school and our kids at home as well. And you and I were talking a lot about how much this is causing us to really struggle with this, you know, putting this into this work week scenario. And then you proposed these remote team handbooks and the concept of window work. Can you talk us through those both? Yeah, sure. I mean, generally the idea of window work is that you break up your week into multiple disjointed blocks. And there are two sides to that. One is planning your week to figure out what works best for you. And then the second is communicating with your team so you can set expectations. And the idea here is that your flexible should be scheduled. It has to be at the moment. Things are so difficult for a lot of us. But it also has to be coordinated. It can't be flexible and chaotic. So you look at the responsibilities you have during the week. When do you have to help your daughter on the Zoom call? When do you have to cover other responsibilities? When can you be available? Look at your energy blocks where they are gonna lock or an owl. And then sketch out work blocks that align with those requirements. We also have this key insight that it's best to not think of workers being bimodal. If you think of workers being on or off, you're always feeling torn. So we try and encourage people to think of three states. And we color code this red, yellow, green. So green is focus block for deep work, for meetings and calls when you can be completely on. Yellow is when you're kind of working, but maybe distracted. So my daughter might be on a virtual art class and I might have to help her, but I'm mostly working. And then red is obviously you're not working and you're focused on your family time. And then per the nomenclature point, as we share that with the team and people get practiced at knowing what green means, what yellow means, what red means. It becomes our own shared sense of vocabulary. And we were very clear like, oh, okay, that's when this person is this type of availability. And we update those regularly every week. Yeah, we encourage people to create these personal handbooks, which are the update. It has this information, but also other stuff like contact information, current priorities, development goals. And then, yeah, I can see on the Monday that someone's updated their handbook and I go and have a look and see what their availability is for the week. And it's really useful to know, for instance, that you're gonna be on two to four in the afternoon. Yeah, I think when we first did the workbooks, it really helped me personally, but I think all of us step back and really reflect on how things have changed and then communicate that out. And because things have been changing almost weekly, it seemed at first like, oh, we're gonna do this once in that set. But actually you're really recognizing that you're processing so much information, everybody's adapting in different ways. And it really requires you to think about each work week, not as a work week, but just how you're gonna manage this current stage, if you will. And I think it really helped me also just manage the guilt, the feeling guilty when I'm working for not being with the kids and helping them out and then feeling guilty because I'm not with the kids. And then the team really got a better sense of what our new workspaces and work environments were like and what our kids was like. Yeah, honestly, I think you tapped into the key magic of it really is that we're so conditioned to feel shame or guilt and not being at your desk the whole work day or for leaving early and sacking off. So by asking people to tell the team what works for them and then to document it, you're implicitly giving them permission to figure out what works best for them and then allowing that and that calms a lot of stress. Like I'm CEO and I still feel guilty of leaving at 4 p.m. in the afternoon. It's like, it's so silly, it's so deeply ingrained. But it does, it is something that also really takes practice. Once we roll this out, we then tested, we iterated just like you would any kind of product and any type of process. And really we're finding so it felt like a good process that people were collaborating on and then you get into the hang of it. And then when you actually communicate to the kids and my kids will check in and like, are you red right now or are you green? And they start to talk about it. And it also helps for you, yeah. It's really that shared vocabulary. Well, I think that's all the time we have. But for anybody interested on rethinking their work week, we have a link to range's free guide to windowed work and that actually also has those a template. If you go to range.co slash blog slash windowed work. So that's range.co slash blog and slash windowed work. You can download that. And thanks so much for hosting us. Yeah, we'd really like to thank GitLab for having us here and looking forward to watching the other sessions. And for anyone that wants to try range, we're offering attendees three months free, just use the referral code commit. Enjoy the conference.