 Good morning. Thank you, Tom. I'm really excited. We have a great panel today of four people who are leading companies that range in size from about 12 employees to 50 plus and they're Leading their companies from four different countries. So with that, let's bring on our panel First we'll start with Magna Ilses. He's the founder of decode and he is based in Norway And we have Alex Frisant. He's the co-founder of impside and he's based in Germany Ilona Philippi, she's the co-founder of move based out of the UK and Matt Johnson is the co-founder of alley interactive and he is based in the US in New York City Thank all of you for being here. I'd like to start with a brief overview if you could do by razor hands Whether you are 100% remote In your agency Okay, so one 100% remote and what about fully We'll get to we'll get to the definition And what about fully in one location? Almost in one location and then two that are quasi office-based and remote correct Great. So the focus of our talk is about cultivating happy teams and how that makes for better business so I'd like to start by Just understanding the true cost of an employee and recruiting employees So Ilona if you want to start maybe tell us about your first time recruiting a new employee what she went through and Yeah Thank you very much Matt So move agency is six years old now and we evolve over the time We started as two co-founders initially and now we are 12 employees and we're what we call hybrid Environment, which means we all work from offices, but in three different locations So what that means is we have office-based culture that transfers Same kind of one location. We use slack extensively. We use Google Hangouts extensively Google Docs etc And that's that regards just to introduce it Half of our company is in London where we source all our business. So essentially We work with UK based customers and we have our development resources across Europe and the way we hire our first employees back in the days because we were very small starting up very cautious we started with interns and Then grown into Fantastic employees over time. So that was great. However now we are a mature company We need senior people. So we tend to hire through various means we use recruiters. We use our own ads We go to networking events, etc. So it's a combination oftentimes. We also try to Grow people Inside of the company so we recruit from universities, etc. And then train them to be with developers Matt are your new hires Ready to go on day one or is there an onboarding process that you go through? Well, it depends. I mean we we want to be able to hire people at a bunch of different levels we We've definitely hired people who were so anyone that we hire needs to be able to hit the ground running with PHP We have a number of different roles, but I'm speaking primarily about people who are going to be wordpress developers So we were willing to hire people who are who can demonstrate knowledge of PHP and We believe they are Intelligent and we'll be able to pick up the basics of wordpress and be able to start Contributing to wordpress based on their knowledge of PHP We also are very happy and have a number of cases have hired people Who are very familiar with wordpress who are often very plugged into the wordpress community? so every hire that we we make we really approach very contextually and We we try to figure out is this person a good fit for our team a good fit for the type of work that we're doing at the time and Do we think that they have the the prospects to grow at alley and eventually take on greater roles and Contribute more and more to the team Alex as a fully remote agency have you focused historically on trying to hire WordPress designers and developers or have you brought in people to wordpress that had knowledge of The technologies that we use in wordpress. I mean it's a mix like sometimes people approaching us at a Yeah at a word camp or something like this and of course they know already wordpress or they have an application and Well, we know them because they did some patches for any plugins or Just they end the word for scene, but sometimes we also have some people. They never had any Contact with a wordpress before you know so for us. It's very important that they Yeah, they have talents for code writing and you know, there's also potential to getting better and this is very important for us our Codex is even more restrict than the wordpress codex and When we start to hire we ask them for you know some code what they have then they have we do have some task Specific tests for them and after that we do have a telephone call and check out Is it also not you know if the code quality is very good? This is the first step and the second step is like it's a person the right one and fits in our team like personal wise So this is very important and Magna is a more of a landlocked agency Recruiting has surely been more of a challenge to get people with built-in wordpress knowledge So how have you all managed to either recruit people with wordpress knowledge or on board them? To be familiar with your platform and be ready to go I Think in Norway, it's a it's really a mix Norway WordPress is it's just getting really popular so in the beginning we had to there are some Developers and people working on wordpress that are really into the community into wordpress. So that's easy but we really have to tap into other skill sets as well and and Kind of teach them the wordpress way away and introduce them to the community through the events like these and also We have a bunch of different roles who are not developers and So we really have to compete with other agencies not wordpress agencies and so so for these different skills and How many employees to each of you have and we'll start over here and just work our way across we're 20 now Okay The same 20 12 we're 52 I believe at last count and Are the majority of all of your workforces full-time? Ours are entirely full-time. Yeah, okay, so We have this establishment here. We have employees with people working for you and We want to focus on how do you keep your teams happy? So that you can have tenure so that you can have people that actually stick around So I'd like to start and set Matt How long do you consider long enough to where you feel like someone has? Stuck with you and has provided value that it was worth the investment that you made hiring them I would say I mean we we want people to stick around as long as possible We have a couple of We have one of the things that I think maybe sort of unique to to us I don't know if other agencies are doing this, but we we start providing a Quarterly profit-sharing bonus every quarter once someone has been employed for one year So that's kind of the the point at which we say like you've made a real commitment to our team And we're gonna start staking you in to how the company is actually doing and this is part of our commitment to really like Very significant transparency with our team like we really open the books about how the company is doing financially and business wise to Our team we really believe the people who work for us are smart They it doesn't make sense to withhold information like that from them So as soon as someone's been around for a year that really that kicks in but even before a year we still Can tell pretty quickly if someone is making significant contributions to the company so we have We have that we have that metric, but we also Have In a lot of cases we have various significant tenure. I mean we have people who've been around for two and a half three Even close to four years at this point Who are and you know, that's That is a you know, there's a mixture of people like who've been around for less than a year But I would say that's like a significant chunk of the company's total time. It's been around which is six and a half years and you know, we also Over time our like ultimate promotion is that someone can make partner in a sense of how law firms work in the United States and Brad who's sitting over there near the front was the first person to alley to make partner. So that's we have a lot of Like paths to Promotion within the company that we can recognize people who've been around longer and longer periods of time Alona Beyond things like beanbag chairs in the office. How do you cultivate? employee happiness and a positive team culture So do we even look at it and move All these benefits that you're talking about we also almost consider it standard within our industry Unlimited holidays working hours that you choose Team retreats, etc. So that's the basics But we look more deeply into motivations of Employees that we look for those who are ambitious who are really passionate about what they do We want people to really like what they do So it extends into the kind of projects that we tend to work on and we're very selective We're not a typical agency in that sense because we want to work on things that move us forward that are Exciting for our team to to work on that enhance our portfolio that are Interesting in in all sorts of aspects, but that is some new API to be integrated or a larger scale or Large client that's interesting to work with so for us It's especially about the type of work because the people that we like to work with that we believe fit our culture Come to work because they want to move forward in in their careers in in their skill set, etc So it's it's a type of work that we bring in apart from all the usual stuff And the demand in your market has been high enough that you can be more selective so that the clients that come in are Exciting projects for for employees. That's a good question We all wish there would be more projects, but that's where The leadership comes in Which says instead of growing for the sake of growing will be growing at a pace that allows us to Pick the right projects for our team There's a concept that's been popularized over the past couple of years in the WordPress community and agencies Called five to the future, which is something that Matt Mullen-Waig Discussed a couple of years ago, and it's about contributing five percent of your time or your workforce's time back to the community Have any of y'all tried doing this or something similar and what kind of success have you seen? I mean we do quite a bit for the community We also are co-organizing like WordCamps in Germany or we have also like plugins available and some of them, you know, I'm really participating to develop or have some patches for the core development and all the stuff and also that we go to WordCamps together and have a retreat and with a whole team that we go there and Yeah sessions speaking sessions and all the stuff on WordCamps So we really support that because we are from the community We were created or we met in first place in the community So and then we started the agency and so we always give back because we also receive a lot so this is very important for us and this is Yeah, also our employees there really like to Provide something to the community because it's it's a good thing, you know because and also Yeah, like I said, we receive a lot of it. Does anyone else have a specific program in place at their company for contributing back to The WordPress community Or is it more self-selective? Again, we're a strange little country up north and and since it's us introducing a lot of employees to the WordPress community And we're not used to necessarily this the way of sharing So code-wise we do some contributions, but I think our biggest contribution is to help Moving WordPress in into a position Where it's popular enough so that the community can grow and there's actually Work to be found for more people and I think as the community and as businesses in Norway Mature there will be more contribution contributions towards the kind of the code code part of WordPress so For us, it's about organizing meet-ups and WordPress work camp in Norway and so on I Would just add briefly that one of the we don't have like a dedicated 5% policy But we do one of the things that we do try to apply as a strategy when we're building Projects for clients is to try to work with clients to sell them on the benefits of underwriting an open source project And we've had a pretty significant amount of success with some clients one of our oldest clients Which is the health policy research firm called the Kaiser Family Foundation in the US? they essentially sponsored us to build a plug-in called field manager, which is a At this point very robust Meta-manager for WordPress that we've released as open source And we've had a significant amount of community involvement from outside Allian And that was something where we got a client to As part of the project they were paying us to do anyway to build code that was going to be Releasable to the whole community and that we would continue to support and in exchange for which they would get like sort of a Recognition and and goodwill from the community for it So we try to create those sort of like public-private partnerships if you will When we when we work with clients, so we have we have a number of projects that have grown out of that that type of cooperation what role does salary play and creating happy employees and This is a hairy subject a lot of times because salary is something that we don't talk about a lot and it also varies greatly depending on where the employees located where The company is located. So when you're recruiting new employees I'd like to hear maybe from magna from from a local sense and then Alex from a remote sense How do you negotiate salary and how do you find a middle ground so that it's good for the company so that singular employees are not Getting too much salary, you know income away from the company, but also so that you're Fully equipping this employee and enticing them to do their best work I Think the most important thing is that We we try to establish a culture and we try to learn from the WordPress community and kind of the openness and the way of thinking through working on WordPress and to create a really good work culture and to have a Work culture where where people can Really take responsibility if they want to and by creating in the attractive work environment Now we are attracting really good people who Where salary is of course important, but they also understand that we're we've been a startup company that we need to kind of grow into Not higher standards, but higher salaries and bigger projects and bigger income So it's a it's a step-by-step process. I think and we're It's sometimes really hard because we're competing against non WordPress companies and there may be two three four five hundred employees And of course they have a different Economy so it's really important to also focus on the the non economic sites on building company I mean like he says, you know, we competing with other agencies or corporate companies And they offer a much better salary most of the time, but you know, we do also have some other benefits You know people they are liberal in their work time. We they have a lot, you know interesting projects and Also, we give them a lot of trust and responsibility which they really like and they can do a lot of their own and this these are quite important benefits to the comparing also to the salary and Because of the location since we are remote We don't have any salary because of any location and it's because of the quality of their work Ilona was the number one benefit that you've been able to provide employees to Help create satisfaction So I suppose choose choose their own hours. Well, I wouldn't say what number one benefit, but choose their own hours Take as much what it is as they need work independently I suppose the combination of all three where you give the Environment to the employees to to especially senior type of employees that they can work on using their own initiative and and feel like They're part of something that they're building not just a small wheel in a in a big big machine And Matt's in question Well, you know there's perks perks and benefits are good But I think that what really keeps people around is the the chance to work with really great co-workers and on really engaging projects So that's that's one of the best things that I think we can give people the other but probably the most important like actual perk that we can give people is that they're freed from the the tyranny of a like physically attending an office from 9 to 5 which if you Europeans have heard that there's like a very oppressive overwork culture in the United States that's quite true and Freeing people from that system is like an immense benefit like my wife has a job Or she has to be chained to a desk from 8 a.m. To 6 p.m. Every day And it like really affects her happiness with her job So I see that firsthand that contrast between what she has to go through and why she's looking for another job right now And what our employees can sort of structure just just to take like a small amount of like flex in their schedule or their ability to not have to commute on a day that it doesn't work for them to Then really like that that causes an immense increase in anyone's happiness that that I've seen So I think that's one of the most important benefits that we offer Great. Thank you, and I believe we have a few minutes for questions from the audience while Go ahead. Do you want to go ahead? No, I was gonna say well while You're grabbing the first questioner. Yeah, I have a filler between them. I would love your filler. I would like If you have a question, please raise your hand, okay, and we'll listen to Brian's filler How many of you have managed to grow your companies from 1 to 12 to 20 to 50? Using a retainer based model where you have long-term clients where employees spend a number of hours per week or month or something on them everybody and Have you found that an effective route for? Being able to grow to have that steady income that's I thought so. I just wanted to make sure Okay, so hopefully we have our first questioner I would say when you ask your question and it would also be useful if you Make it clear whether that question is for the entire panel or for someone specific So that we know who it's directed to okay, I help run an agency in Bulgaria and I'm kind of wanting to open things up to flex time and More open holidays and half of our employees are very into that and half of our employees Really like that rigid standard schedule. So this is kind of for Iana How you balance employees that want that flexible holiday time with employees that just Want that very formal work environment? Thank you. So to answer the question. We still currently have all our employees coming to the office So it's not that some work from home. All of them come to the office. It's just that we're across three locations You can think of it as free offices But we're thinking of moving into even more remote working model where people can choose simply Whether they want to work from home or coming to the office, it will be their choice and our Processes are ready for it already because we have these three offices and the way We will manage it is I suppose as every other remote company there'll be some core hours where we would expect people to be online and We might meet initially once or twice a week in the offices, but I don't see it being such a big Difference as it might seem initially However, you do need to accommodate for the people who do like the office type of environment that they like the separation between Work and person life and who who feel more productive in in the office space which for us also is at least 50 percent maybe even 80 percent of our employees so Giving them the option. I think is the best maybe downgrading the The big office and allowing 50 percent of your people working from home and 50 percent still coming to Some some environment might be the answer Which we are looking into as well by the way Do you have another one ready again? Hi, my name is Martin and I have a question for the whole panel. Do you Use any form do you have like a weekly short meeting? How do you actually assess if somebody is? Happy or is not happy because I mean in order to to make your team happy first You need to know where the people stand, right? Especially if you're not in the same office all day, you don't pick up on the little clues, right? somebody's probably not looking so good or You don't have like a coffee corner talk about what's going on and how people are performing So how do you actually find out if the people are happy or not and what to do about it? I mean since we are remote office. It's more difficult. That's right and We do have talks like one-on-one or also in a team How frequently do you do and we have like in the team once a week and one-on-one? Depends if they really want to but they always know I know that the door is open And we also Emphasize that they can say everything. I mean we are open for critics. We are open for new ideas for everything It's not like okay, they are right and the employer wrong or something like this Really want to have the feedback and sometimes you get to it's kind of an experience that you know Okay, they have something on their chest to talk about but they don't so you really Emphasize them to say like hey, what's going on or what's wrong or maybe also with the teammate or in a project It's always good. We have really like an open community kind of and everybody has has a voice and this is very important for us and So there we can find out if they are happy or not And if they're not happy we can always talk about it and try to you know find a solution or change something and Yeah, it's it's been good for that. Does anyone have a significantly different one-on-one feedback policy? Well, I so we I think we do something that's a little unusual Maybe it's not but Since our projects are organized unlike our ad hoc and rolling basis We just we don't have like direct supervisors We have instead of something called coaching where each person has a coach who's not their boss, but they're their Advocate slash mentor and that's the main forum where someone would be able to explain to their coach like because of that We have you know, you have a weekly or bi-weekly meeting with your coach And at that point you can talk about like how's it going? Well, how do you feel about what you're currently working on? Are you engaged or your board? Do you want a different challenge? Stuff like that and then we have every twice a year We have reviews where coaches come together and like we compile all the feedback about everyone and we tell we tell the The team members how we think they're doing and that's also a forum for them to kind of tell us how we're doing and Just come together about how we're all feeling about their relationship to the company And so that that's been actually it took us a while to get to that system But it's been a really helpful forum for like decentralizing the feedback channels to make it actually scale to 50 people Because it used to be that I as one of the partners could talk to every employee when we were 10 people I could definitely do that I can't really do that when we're 50 people like can't talk to them once a week It's just too many people. So this was this has been really helpful to kind of like, you know Make it a peer-to-peer feedback system in a sense All right. Thank you very much if anyone has additional questions you can track these folks down Outside and I am sure I can speak on behalf of all of them when I say they're probably hiring. Thank you