 Hi there, welcome back to the Daniel Rossell podcast. This is episode number 33 of the podcast. Now I wanted to say a couple of notes. Firstly, I did start this podcast a couple of years back, and it was at the time, something I intended getting into. And it's just kind of fallen off my creative radar since my creative. So it's not very active is what I'm trying to say, given the fact that frequently six months, elapses between episodes, people probably got that idea. But just saying that for anybody who is subscribed to this podcast, I am one person and have limited time, but I do love creating content. It's kind of what sort of keeps me going and keeps my creative juices going. Most of my work currently, I'm putting a lot of effort into my YouTube channel, because I think video is super cool and very exciting, and gives me a lot of scope for learning because it's something that's more new to me than writing an audio. So I'm doing a lot of work there. So you can look me up. Anyone interested in this podcast on YouTube, just type Daniel Rossell for lack of a more imaginative name for a channel, or rather until I figure out a more specific niche. I'm just calling it by my name. So there that's why you that's where you can find me on YouTube. And you can also check out my medium blog. It is Daniel Rossell.medium.com. Again, very unimaginative. And that's where I'm doing a lot of writing. I also have a personal blog, because I've been hosting my own websites for so long for literally like 10 years at this point that I have a like mixed feeling about medium. It makes it so easy to publish. But equally, I feel like I should be doing the responsible thing and publishing on my own web infrastructure. So that is Danielsrossell.com. So that's my bargaining online empire or some kind of current current components to it that I'm publishing my stuff. So speaking of medium, I put a blog up there today and it's called three keys to creating a more effective remote working environment. Now I'm going to be putting this podcast episode up onto this aforementioned YouTube channel. So I'll put a link in that description. I'll also put a link in the description of this actual podcast episode. And I wrote this this morning because I do think I do feel very passionately about this subject. I'm a huge believer in remote work. I think it can revolutionize the game for people based in Israel. Specifically, that's my kind of selfish aspect to it is that being based here and being an English speaker, I've sometimes been frustrated by the local job market. Not that there isn't a job market in Israel. As most people know, there is a very big technology scene here. But sometimes it has its frustrating aspects. And I think this idea of being able to work with the world is brilliant. And I've been advocating for many years. I've been freelancing for full time for by three years and four months and probably coming up on three and a half years. I've been doing it also as a side hustle. So I've been freelancing from Israel for about seven years at this point. And I've always been advocating that if you're going to have a teak, which means in Hebrew, a file, and you have the ability to work with English speaking clients, you should work with clients anywhere in the world. If you're going to be going to the hassle of working for yourself, you may as well expand your horizons beyond Israel. And as I've mentioned, everything regarding Israel in the world seems to be polarizing if people say, oh, but you have to work with Israeli companies and blah, blah, blah. And I don't see it like that at all. In fact, I see it as almost a patriotic thing to work with the world because the more Israeli-based people or Israel-based people work internationally, the more accustomed foreign companies are going to be to working with people in Israel. It's going to stop sounding like this random place in the desert and more like, you know, oh, yeah, we've got some guys in Israel. So I'm a big advocate, big fan for us. And I've been over the course of the past couple of years involved in a variety of team and configurations, ranging from freelancing on contracts with companies to working as a hybrid worker with Israeli companies, which means you shop to the office one day or two days per week and fully remote. Now, has to be said, I have had a tumultuous experience with the hybrid work environment in particular. In fact, over the past couple of years, I have exited myself from not just one but two hybrid relationships that frankly did not work out. And this was kind of the impetus for writing this post. It was, I've seen really good work environments and I've seen really poorly done remote working environments. And therefore I've just drawn a few conclusions because I think that this is going to be the way everything will be going. And of course, it would be better to have good than bad work environment. So here's my list. Here are the three things I believe are key to creating better remote work environments. Number one is the management style that is going on. And this is the biggest criticism I'd have of the two short, my two short-lived tenures with Israeli companies in a hybrid configuration was that they were super micromanagerial. And I find that I personally as a creative find that just incredibly frustrating. In fact, it's one of the first things when I'm going for a job interview that I try to suss out is how does what kind of job is this? Is this kind of a job where you're looking for someone to contribute ideas to create a strategy or are you looking for someone just to execute? And the danger is that people will mislead you, which has happened to me on a number of occasions. But if people are being honest, even a couple of answers to that question can be enormously telling. And this is the weird, this is the thing that I think sometimes has thrown me for a loop is you have these companies, I work mostly with the technology sector, because that's just my experience, it's my interest, and it's a big part of the market here. And you often have these very technologically advanced companies, you know, they're developing an API or they're developing a mainframe to client backup platform or something techie. And because they're techie, you kind of think, well, they must be super modern in all respects. And I frequently found that that's not the case. Now, I regard autocratic top down management as an outdated idea. I don't really see it as Congress was being a modern organization, but that's I've encountered that very frequently among companies and surprisingly in Israel, because Israel has kind of reputation as a, I'm trying to just not make this just about my experience here in Israel, but Israel has a reputation as a very informal culture. But I have quite frequently encountered strangely hierarchical organizations here, which I personally attribute to the military background of a lot of people, especially startup founders, that I imagine a military functions in a very autocratic manner. But I don't think that works well in remote environments. I think if you're going to be hiring for remote, you're going to be hiring remote workers, you need to give them your remote workers a bit of breathing space. And if you're are micromanaging your remote workers, and to just kind of give a couple of salient examples of micromanagement, if you're checking in with them five times per day, how are your tasks list going? There's a 9am check and there's a 12pm check and there's a 2pm check and there's a 4pm check. And I would class that as probably micromanagement. I would also classify, you know, when your boss asks you to be CC'd on every single email, that's another classic micromanager move. So if that's the case, I would say why are you hiring remote workers in the first place? Because if you don't trust your workers to have some degree of freedom and trust their input, then what's the point of doing remote working just for the sake of remote working? It's fine to say it doesn't work for you. And I think that's what we're seeing at the moment is there is a big rush among startups and startups especially to say, yeah, we do remote work, we're fully remote or we're hybrid, but not everybody's actually has the internal company philosophy and managerial capability to work with that. Because as I said, if you're going to have anxious micromanagers, that's going to set up a horrible clash with remote workers who by and large, I believe I think it's fair to say tend to be more self-motivated than your average employee. They're kind of more veering towards independent contributor, a lot of them might have backgrounds in self-employment and they love working somewhat independently. They're self-motivators. And if you're going to put those people directly under micromanagers, then it's a recipe for disaster. Or more honestly, it's just a recipe for turnover. For turnover is a big, much, much bigger waste of money than I think many companies realize because retention being cheaper than hiring and all these stats aside, it's just a big waste of time to constantly being interviewing and bringing people up to speed, only for them to leave and bleeding out institutional knowledge. So that's all a big waste of time. So the second thing actually that's a related point is I'm a big believer in documentation. Documenting things, standard operating procedures, SOPs or just anything else. And I think in their mode environment, this becomes more key. Now, I've frequently worked with organizations that are kind of in this crazy scaling mode. And sometimes when scale happens too quickly, it's very discombobulating. You've got people joining every week and it's almost chaos. Now, I think one way of mitigating the chaos a little bit is to have some really, really solid knowledge management systems in place KMS. Now, this is something I'm pedantic about. And I find it's a battle. Either I can decide that we're going to be doing this or people will say, no, that's a waste of time. It's not adding value. And I think that's the short-sighted approach. I think it's a tremendous value add to be documenting what people know or what new people particularly need to know in a company. The reason I say I think this is particularly important in their mode environment is when you have people spread across different time zones. You have people frequently joining the company. Then, you know, if you're saying the same thing, I've seen this so many times over and over again, you're having the sales guy give the same brief to new hires about how we run sales in this company. Then you're wasting time because that does not need to be a repetitive one-to-one brief. That does not even need to be a synchronous meeting. And I'll talk about async versus synchronous in a second. That basically is a poor process and that process can be much improved by having that asynchronous and knowledge management. So you could have, I'm a big fan of Confluence, which is part of the Atlation Suite. There's also Google Sites or Google Docs. It can be, you can host internal, you can have an internal podcast. Here's an idea. You can have an internal video library. Here's another idea. And you can just have internal tech. So you've actually got a bunch of different options. You can even do all three. You could have videos and make those extract MP3s and extract text from that. I've talked in the context of my marketing podcast about the value of, you know, making information available across all different formats. So you've got a variety of options there at your disposal, but you basically should do that internally. I think that that can be a really, really big value add is, you know, this can be a job for someone you can absolutely have a knowledge manager in the company. But it's probably for smaller to medium teams, not really a big enough enterprise. And it's going to be a limited job for somebody. You're going to have to have someone who really, really loves documentation. So more likely an internal communications person could do this. Or if you just have a general comms person or a marketing communications person, I personally love this. And I always volunteer myself for the effort. But anyway, I think it's really important in a remote environment to always be always be documenting. So final thing here in my list is making asynchronous communication your default and not your backup. So I love async and I'm a big fan of stuff like Loom and Yak and all the other tools that are designed for asynchronous communications. Just in case anyone has not heard about this, async basically communication between two parties or more parties that does not require everyone there at the same time. Contrast with synchronous communication in which everyone does. So this is again, if I can point to something I've seen in poor remote work organizations where there's just chaos and people are not working effectively and morale is low and there's confusion and it all goes hand in hand. And again, I'm not trying to knock on Israel here, but something I've seen I think Israelis actually really struggle with is this is a big phone first culture. In which, you know, the default way to resolve issues is talking. Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with talking. I just think that if everyone talks in real time or just picks up the phone and calls another or picks up Slack and Slack VOIP is one another, which is basically just the exact same thing. It's very hard for anyone to get into a flow work state. So async isn't about talking less. It's about talking not in real time. In other words, an email is just the most simple async communication channel that everyone is familiar with. And that's actually async is you can write someone an email. And, you know, when they are checking their email, they'll go through their emails in a batch and it's actually generally more effective. Now, you can't, many organizations, you can't only have async. And the example I give in this blog post is if you call an ambulance, you need someone, an ambulance operator or a dispatch center, you need them to be there ready to pick up a call and speak to you right now to ask you questions about where is the emergency happening, etc. So you can't have an ambulance service work async. You can't have it that, you know, they check their, they check their voicemail once or twice a day and, you know, they get back to you and, you know, the patient could be gone at that point. So we can see that clearly async is not cannot be absolute in many contexts. But the point here is that most businesses do not have emergency situations or people are grossly abusing the ease of synchronous communication, which is ultimately a form of selfishness that you want an answer right away to be impatient. So what I what I think I don't think it should be only async. I think for most companies, there should be separate channels for true emergencies. But those are probably, you know, revenue critical mission critical emergencies, but those are probably few and far between and really limited to specific teams. And I think that for most teams async first will actually work perfectly well and really works well in remote because of the fact that people are in different time zones and people are spread across the world. And therefore, it can be a real bottleneck if everyone's just like calling another and the guy isn't available. So remote can actually be, I think a great way for organizations to ease into asynchronous communications as a kind of philosophy. So that's about it. I don't want to make this overly long. Those are my three recommendations based on my personal experience at working as a contractor, hybrid worker, remote worker with different companies in different countries. And three things I think that if they're done well, I believe can make very, very positive contributions towards the success of an organization. Thank you very much for watching and as for listening. And as I mentioned at the start of this podcast, if you want to catch up with more of my content creation activity, I tend to talk a lot about marketing communications. I talk, I do some videos about Israel. I do some videos about remote working and async and it's kind of freeform at the moment. So it's a little bit all over the place topic wise. But if you do want to catch my thoughts on those subjects, then you can check out my medium. As I mentioned, that's danielrosil.medium.com. My YouTube is danielrosil.com slash medium, or you can go on to my home page, which is danielrosilrosilhas2elsinit.com. And I have links up there to basically everywhere, almost everywhere I am on the internet, my YouTube, my medium, my email address. If you want to contact me, danielrosil.com. Thank you guys for listening and have a enjoy the holidays and the upcoming New Year. And I will speak to you all soon.