 We're here. We did it. We're here in the same room. I'm so excited. I'm so excited to see all of you. I keep like right now I'm like looking out and I'm seeing faces. I haven't said hi to yet. I'm very excited. Very excited to be here. I also was really looking forward to Cyrus's talk on internal linking and I can't wait for the blog post. But today I'm going to talk to you about building remote culture that actually feels like a culture. So as Rob mentioned, UpBuild has been fully remote, fully distributed since day one. It's a core part of our identity as an agency. I think it's a core part of what allows us to do the things that we do. And a reality that I think many people in this room and across the globe are facing right now is that remote work is here to stay. We are not putting those bubbles back in the bottle. Can't happen. A lot of people during the Pando were like wow I actually don't need to go to the office and I love I'm here. I control the thermostat. I got my soft pants on. I pet my dog whenever I want. It is a good life. And a lot of business owners were like wow we are not paying rent and internet and phones and snacks and toner and janitorial. Our overhead gets real low. Real nice and low. I like this. Not everybody's on board with this but the fact is that remote work is here to stay. And one of the things that a lot of people are facing as they are either transitioning to being fully remote or building a new company that's fully remote is figuring out how to build their company culture without all being in the same place. So what do we mean by company culture? You think about company culture. You might think about things like you have foosball table. You have free snacks. You have a dress code that's business casual. It's casual. It's formal. You might have how you do meetings. You might have corporate values. You might have all of these different things and these are portions of your company culture. It's true. But really your company culture is more than that. If your team is a fish. If your team members are fish. Company culture is the water that they swim through. You can kind of think of company culture very similarly to the way that you would think about building a brand externally. Your brand is everything your customers or your users experience while interacting with your company. Good or bad. All of it is part of that. Same with company culture. It's every piece of your team's experience of working at your business. And that is going to include things that you don't control. And it's definitely going to include things that you didn't do on purpose. But it is all part of your company culture. And when you are managing a remote team that becomes a lot more important to do intentionally. When you're in person at an office a lot of company culture just kind of happens. For better or for worse. There are certainly offices that I have worked at where everyone being in one place together is creating a company culture that's probably not what anybody's trying to build. But for better or for worse you don't necessarily have to be as intentional about building culture and creating culture when you are in an office. I would argue very strenuously that you should be as intentional in person as you are remote. But it's a lot easier to get away with not doing that. Because everyone's in the same place. Everyone's experience is going to be much more the same as everybody else's because you're all in the same place. You're all in the same office. You're all going to the same happy hour. You're all going to the same stupid everyday meeting that takes an hour out of your life and doesn't do anything. You're all yeah yeah that I heard you feel that one. You're all in the same spot so company culture can just sort of wash over you. But when you are a remote worker you're alone. You're in your house. There are not as many built in moments of connection. Not just with other members of your team but with the business with the company itself. It's a lot easier for a remote workforce to feel like they are a bunch of freelancers or a bunch of contractors who all happen to have the same client as opposed to a cohesive team that is all working together toward a common goal. And so when you are managing a remote team or a hybrid team it becomes much more important to work intentionally to build company culture. In person if you don't build company culture it will build itself for better or for worse. Remote if you don't build company culture it just won't exist. And without a strong feeling of connection to your business when people feel like freelancers or contractors instead of part of your team they're much more likely to churn. They're not connected to what you're doing. They don't have buy-in to your larger vision. And in this in this economy oh my god you can't afford that. The great resignation is real. You need to be thinking about how you are creating a place where people want to be part of the team. So the question that you need to ask yourself when you're starting to think about building company culture is what does it feel like to work here? And what do we want it to feel like to work here? When we think of someone's experience of working at this business what do we want that to be like? And as a leader you should already know the answer to this. If you don't then before you do anything else you need to figure that out. Because building culture has a lot in common with brand building. We as marketers have an advantage when it comes to building culture because a lot of us know how to define and build a brand. So a lot of brand building exercises are also great culture building exercises. You can do a card sorting exercise. What are the attributes of our internal brand of our company culture? Is it casual? Is it formal? Is it playful? Is it serious? What is our vision? What is our mission? What are our values? Now when you're asking yourself what are your corporate values I would encourage you to be really really honest with yourself or if you are not the leader of the team but you know the person is be really honest with them. Because so many companies say that they have company values and then don't live them. When you say one thing and you do another as the leadership of a company that feeling of what does it feel like to live here becomes cognitive dissonance. When people are saying oh we really prioritize innovation and playfulness and thoughtfulness and what we actually prioritize is making money and doing the things the same way that they've always been done and no one comes into the boss's office and complains to them. That starts to be a disparate experience from what is said and what is lived. So be brutally honest with yourself. One great way to play it to start is what's more important to you than revenue? What are the things that you would say we cannot take on this additional revenue because it does not adhere with the following values? That teaches you where you live. What's more important to you than money? That's what you value. If the answer is nothing then think about what are the things that you value most that are going to make you the most money. But really be honest. Think about how you are going to define that internal brand and then again in the same way that you would do brand building build a brand strategy ask where can we create and reinforce that feeling? So again your team is the fish company culture is the water there are parts of it you can't control there are parts of it that they are going to experience that you didn't do on purpose but when especially when you're mapping out a remote team you have a huge opportunity to look at the touch points that each of your team members has as the experience working for and with you and optimize that to create the culture that you want. So in much the same way that you would do with your customers in your brand where are the touch points that we can reinforce our team culture and here are a few that I found to be really important in the last six years of managing a remote team. A big one is hiring when you are managing a remote team you need to hire so carefully because you're never seeing this person in person. There are two people that I work with right now that I've literally never met. There's another person I work with who I didn't meet for more than two years because of the pandemic. You need to hire carefully and you need to be looking for some of the specific skills that someone in a remote workplace needs more than someone in an in-person workplace might need. So this is my team at UpBuild. Oh look at them I love them so much. At UpBuild it takes us about two months to hire. From the first app for the first time we post a job opportunity all the way through to the offer letter from the first time we interact with somebody I should say the first time somebody applies to hiring that person takes about two months and over the course of that we look at a lot of different kinds of things. We interview them we look at their resume you know hiring but we also conduct part of the interview process over Slack because every single day the number one way that we speak to each other is over Slack so how can somebody communicate in the communication methods that you use the most when that's not talking that becomes really important. Same thing with email I actually have people do some homework for me and write an email write an email as though you're writing an email to a client telling them that you messed something up and what you're going to do to fix it. Write an email as though you're writing something to a client who has gotten a fact very wrong and is about to make a bad choice because of it. How are you communicating in the ways that someone in this role needs to communicate and then we also have every single person on the team interview people before we hire them and you know it's little it's short interviews it's just a getting to know you want to be respectful of everybody's time as we scale we're almost certainly not going to be able to do this we can't do this with 100 people right now we have nine people we can do that but think about the people who are going to be half have to work closely with this person because communication becomes so much more important and if they're not jiving if they're not communicating if somebody's not picking up what somebody else is putting down that becomes a problem a lot faster with remote hiring than it does in person. So we've hired this person now comes the crucial moment when it comes to building culture and that is onboarding how many I'm not gonna I hate when speakers ask people to raise their hands and I almost did it I'm sorry um but many many people in this room I'm sure have started a job and you get there on your first day and it's clear that no one has thought about what you're gonna do on your first day like you get there HR they know what to do like here's the handbook here's the forms watch this sexual harassment training video I need a copy of your social security number card like HR has an unlock you get to your manager and they're like oh right you're starting today here's your desk and that's your first day you can't do that with remote work when somebody is starting for you and showing up to work is just turning on their computer you need to set expectations really well and really clearly because otherwise they're going to get to work they're not going to know what to do and that feels bad and they can't just look around be like hey guys what should I be doing because no one's there so when we have somebody who's starting on their first day we build an agenda for them not just for their first day but for their first week every minute is not accounted for but for the first week we make sure that they have meetings set up that they've been invited to everything that's another thing make sure that people are invited to meetings because they're not going to see everybody getting up and going to the meeting that you forgot to invite them to be like hey should I be part of that they're at home by themselves minding their own business triple check they're invited to the meetings that need to be invited to and also set up time for them to meet with people so one of the things that we do at UpBuild which is great for a lot of reasons is we share in the work of out of onboarding we have different team members take a new person through our key deliverables through our core processes through the tools that we use this is great for us as managers because it's much less time consuming it's also great for the person being onboarded and for the rest of the team because it provides them a built-in way right up front where they're having in-depth one-on-one conversations about the work that we do with this new person it's a great way to for people to get to know each other it's a great way for people to start to understand how they're going to work together so meetings with everybody when we think about optimizing touch points again this goes back to brand marketing any kind of written material that you have is an opportunity to reinforce your culture and that includes things like your team member handbook it includes things like the the forms you fill out and the documentation that you have of your processes anywhere where you can add in that specific internal culture brand whatever and you can define these the what are what is your brand voice when it comes to your company culture is it informal is it playful is it serious is it super businessy is it you know whatever that thing is incorporate that tone consistently throughout these pieces of what become essentially internal marketing collateral and branding collateral for your team so that they're having again going back to that idea of cognitive dissonance they're having a consistent experience of what your company culture is and that is consistent with what you say it is so our team member handbook is written it's all written in this very conversational style there are parts of our team member handbook that are not written in that style because they were written by a lawyer and they have to stay that way and when we have those we have a little known from the CEO that says hey this next part was written by a lawyer and it has to be this way so that's why it's different um so that people don't read that legally as part and say oh is this actually how the company secretly is is very legally and contractee and everything else was just a smoke smoke screen no the lawyer said we had to do it that way and that's why we pay them so that's why it's the way that it is and every time you onboard you can get better with this every time you onboard you can read look at all of your marketing collateral your handbook your documentation your processes all of the things that you go over with people when they first start take a minute because your company culture is going to evolve over time and it's really easy to not update that stuff because you're not thinking about it onboarding provides you a nice regular cadence with which to check in with yourself and the team about company culture and make sure that those important initial touch points are reinforcing the kind of culture that you want to be creating another thing that we do which is not talking to remote workers i'm given to understand that this is not popular we require everybody to be on video for calls and meetings we just do like you know it's fine if you're in a t-shirt you might want to brush your hair you can always put in a hat but we do find that that face-to-face communication with a fully remote team is super important in terms of actually building those connections and we have also found that with our clients it has a huge impact on client retention when we are face-to-face on video calls and meetings so not everybody likes it i really recommend requiring video in meetings so now your teams there they're onboarded now we're going to manage them and this is the number one question that i got when we the pandemic first started and everybody was struggling to figure out how to go remote is oh my gosh ruth you've been doing this for years how do you know your team's actually working if you can't see what they're doing how do you know that they're doing the right things you can't see them how do you know that they haven't left the house for hours how do you know that they aren't taking a nap or watching tv and our tracking is important there are a lot of different tools that you can use for time tracking we use ever hour they're a bunch of other other ones on here and a huge amount of them out in the marketplace we track time for a few reasons i want to know if somebody's not working enough because it might mean that they don't have enough to do i want to make sure nobody's working too much because if they burn out then they'll quit and i don't want that i need to make sure that the amount of time we spend on a deliverable is more or less the amount of time that we're getting paid to spend on it so that we're providing value to our clients and not losing money on projects that is the level of detail that you need in order to run a team but there is one weird trick that you can use to figure out whether or not your team is actually doing work while they're remote if you don't have a way to see whether or not work is getting done that is not remote works problem that is a management problem uh and you know what if somebody's watching a movie while they're working what if somebody takes half an hour to go watch walk their dog while they're working what if somebody's getting in late later than they're supposed to or leaving earlier than they're supposed to like a lot of this stuff i don't care what if they're watching a movie i don't care is the work getting done is it getting done to the standard that we need it to get done are people where they're supposed to be when they need to be there are they available when they're supposed to be available yes then i don't care if you take 30 minutes out of the minute out of the middle of the day to eat a sandwich and then you don't add that 30 minutes back on at the end of the day but all your work got done i don't care i don't have time to care i'm very busy so you need to make sure as a manager that you have a way to understand whether or not the work is getting done to the standard that you needed to get done and that's what you need to care about resist the temptation to micromanage your employees because you can't see them they hate it and it's a waste of everyone's time now when you're planning for somebody's workload i like to plan for about 30 minutes of non-billable time for every 60 minutes of billable time just because somebody now does not have to commute does not mean that they're suddenly banging out 40 billable hours a week or at least they shouldn't be because they're going to burn out and you need to provide ways for them to track non-billable time to things like learning and email and meetings but what you don't want for somebody to be spending an hour every day on time tracking because you paid them for that hour and it was not efficiently used what if instead they took that hour and did something that they enjoyed and returned to work the next day refreshed what about that how would that be the last thing i want to talk about is building a team who knows that they're a team so this is something that i actually had to go on a bit of a learning journey as i became a manager because the thing is as a manager i talk to everyone all the time i talk to the team all the time i have one-on-ones with everybody every week i'm in client meetings with them i'm in sales meetings with them i am a manager and a lot of what i do is go to meetings that is not true for the practitioners on our team and it can be really easy to unintentionally isolate them from each other which makes them less connected to each other it goes back to the idea of what does it feel like to work here it also makes them feel less like a team it makes them less likely to share information and insights and knowledge with each other as an agency that's one of the best things about working at an agency is working with other people who do the things that you do and i know there are some in-house people in here who felt that really hard and like i empathize with that but when you are working with a team you should have the benefit of that so you need to as a leader create an environment where that's possible and easy part of how we create an environment where everybody feels like they actually work at the office is we give people money to build their home out to make their home office the way that they want everybody at upbuild gets 500 bucks a year for a home office allowance and that can be anything people use it to paint their office people have gotten plants people have gotten wireless speaker systems you can stack your home office allowance i stacked it for three years and got a new laptop whatever the thing is that you need to make your office the way that you want to have it this is the kind of thing it's very easy for a company to offer especially if it's reimbursable because then it's not a whole tax situation but also it is just it's such an easy way for your team to know that you feel appreciated so that you're not like oh your monitor sucks that is too bad here have some money fix it and over time you get to see people like they get to create the space that they want that's the beauty of remote work you're at home in your own space buy into some of the advantages of remote work by helping people make their home space the way that they want it to be another thing we do to foster those points of connection so going back to this idea there's no water cooler there's no coffee breaks people don't have to talk to each other so make them talk to each other this is a something that buffer has been doing for years buffer you know of course hugely influential in the world of building remote culture um they have a pair call they do it every day because they have a bigger team we do it twice a week twice a week everybody at upbuild is paired up with somebody else at upbuild they have to have a 15 minute conversation twice in that week that is not about work it can be about anything you want it doesn't have to but it doesn't it shouldn't be about work that's a great way to get people to socialize during the pandemic we actually introduced the the option to opt out of that because it's like how you've been doing bad what do you do this weekend nothing um not great but uh it is a way to get people to talk to each other we also use slack every wednesday we have a water cooler wednesday question it's just a random question that i come up with and uh we all to discuss it this is uh last wednesday so it was uh you wake up in the last tv show you watch how's that doing it's going great for me because i'm on jeopardy with remote work you have this enormous opportunity for the first time to be super flexible about where you work and when you work and building in elements of your company culture that don't encourage that are going to take away from the benefits that remote work provides and are probably going to result in some of your team who really wanted to work remotely going somewhere else one thing that we do at upbuild as we have office hours so 9 a.m to 2 30 p.m pacific which for me in Oklahoma City is 11 a.m to 4 30 p.m those are office hours any meeting that we have is going to be during that time that's when we expect people to be available on slack so when we expect people to be responsive via email if i need to get a hold of you during that time i expect to be able to do it within a reasonable interval of time because i can't just go by your desk what that means if some of you are doing the math you may notice that this doesn't add up to 40 hours a week or even 35 hours a week which is really more what we aim for what this allows people to do is have some consistency to know that their team will be there when they need them and then to structure the rest of their life however they want so i have a colleague on the west coast he's a real morning person i'm really not which means that he and i start work at the same time every day 7 a.m pacific 9 a.m central and that kind of flexibility he gets to do his work when he's thinking best in the morning i get to not try to work before i start having thoughts which is around 9 a.m and and you know it's same at the end of the day and it creates all this flexibility where you don't have to think oh i have a doctor's appointment do i need to take pto can i just go to who i need to know just schedule it for outside of office hours and then show it for office hours as a leader especially in a remote team you need to think about the examples that you're setting when you're communicating again i would argue that this applies to everybody but especially with a remote team remote work is about trust all work is about trust remote work is especially about trust you need to show your team that you trust them to get their work done and in return they need to demonstrate that you can trust them to get their work done that means you're not micromanaging that means you're not checking in all the time and nitpicking their hours it means you are helping them do their best work and when they get stuck you are helping them get unstuck this creates a feeling it's real real common easy called psychological safety psychological safety not a new concept this is from an academic paper from 1999 you shall read psychological safety in the workplace is the idea that the team is not going to embarrass reject or punish someone from speaking up and this in the time that i have been leading remote teams is the thing that i have to train people out of the hardest the idea that if you have a problem you need to tell me i want you to tell me if you don't know what to do you need to tell me you need to ask the team i want you to ask the team i'm not going to attack you the team's not going to attack you i'm not going to think less of you i'm not going to make a little mental note oh so-and-so doesn't know what that is and they really showed at their level oh if they don't know it then i'm going to help them know it that's my job a lot a lot of businesses are not doing this studies have shown studies have shown 1999 this is from 20 years ago um i was in high school when this paper came out it's been a minute studies have shown over and over and over and over that psychological safety is a great indicator of overall productivity people do better work when they know that they can be vulnerable when they know that their team has their back when they know they can ask questions and get answers if something is going to take you nine hours of googling to figure out or one question on slack to figure out guess which one i would rather pay for as the person who signs your pay checks it's you asking a question and getting an answer from people you can trust who trusts you think of the example that you're setting experience ego death it's hard you can do it as the leader you of all people need to be making yourself vulnerable you of all people need to be leading by example saying hey i'm stuck i don't know how to do this have you ever seen this before oh i noticed this is this new or just have i not seen it suddenly people also ask answers are a lot less prevalent is that just me or is this actually happening what are you seeing i'm stuck on a client oh we did this thing for this client when you have a team that truly trusts each other and feels safe you can do amazing things and share amazing knowledge and something to remember when you're managing a remote team asking questions in writing is so much harder than doing it in person when somebody can't lean across the cubicle and say hey i i don't understand this can you explain it to me that's easy it's secret when somebody has to type it out into the slack channel and everyone at the company can read it even typing out a slack dm and you see your words it's like your imposter syndrome just slapping you in the face it's hard so you as a leader need to create a space where people can be vulnerable where you know that people aren't going to be attacked because you're not going to attack them because if somebody else does you're going to shut that down where people help each other and want to help each other this is the most important thing that you can do when it comes to building remote culture is create that feeling of psychological safety because they're not seeing it in your face they're not hearing it in your voice even if it's even if you are speaking over video they're not in your presence every day to build at the trust so you as a leader need to show them that it is okay to be vulnerable by making yourself vulnerable yourself by praising and rewarding and high-fiving and calling out like hey there was really great question asking on that call or hey i love how you didn't know what to do and you took it to the team you found a good solution you worked together that was great that's what i want that's what i want to see because then what's going to happen is next time that person has a problem they're going to ask you and you're going to help them solve it and they're going to learn and you're going to do great work and you're going to make more money and they're going to love working for you and then they keep working for you and make more money it's like one of those flywheels marketers are always talking about have you seen this who wrote this whole thing the last thing i will say is that with remote work you have to be diligent about boundaries everyone loves boundaries did you know this everyone loves boundaries they may not know it but they do when people know what to expect from you and when it makes you very relaxing to be around so with remote work that work life balance now i am at work now i am at home it's both all the time how do you create those divisions how can you lead your team in creating those divisions for me i go in my office i close the door i had a conversation with my husband six years ago when i started this job that said if i was working in an office i would not be cleaning the house or doing laundry during the day because i wouldn't be here so i cannot do chores during the day because i'm not at home i'm at work not everybody needs that help your team figure out where those boundaries are and more importantly help your team stop work help your team draw a line for themselves where they are no longer at work where they are not working a little bit all the time and feeling like they're simultaneously always working and not working hard enough help your team work when they work stop when they stop and up build we do things like if you honestly want to work in the evening or on the weekend because that's how your life is set up and it makes your life better to do that i encourage that i don't want our clients to know i don't want our clients to know that they can email you at nine nine pm and get an answer or email you on saturday and get an answer i want you to have that time available to you it's outside of office hours you do not have to be responsive if you want to answer emails just schedule them to go out at the beginning of office hours um if you get on slack when you take pto at up build i will all caps yell at you to go away you have to do these things it becomes even more important with a remote workforce because it's so easy to just work a little bit all the time and that is again how your team burns out so you can help them set good boundaries by setting good boundaries yourself and encouraging them to do the same these are just some of the many ways that you can create a remote team that loves their jobs believes in their workplace and is all bought into a common mission that's the kind of thing at up build everyone has been there for more than two years except the people who started in april we have people at up build who have been here for five six seven years since day one they're still there employee retention it's so much cheaper to keep a good person that it is to keep hiring and experienced ones do this now build your company culture now and you will be seeing the ROI on that decision for years and years and years thanks everybody