 Ultimately, saving that energy of what I used to do with what Andrew am I today, what role am I playing, let's focus on playing the role of being in the office, I can one, focus that on just doing better work. But also working remotely in that sense has been a godsend for my mental health. Hello and welcome to a new weekly webcast from GitLab. Each week we'll take about 30 minutes to talk about the realities of remote work. We'll tackle the real challenges, we'll ask the hard questions, but of course we'll try not to take ourselves too seriously. So I'm Darren, I'm head of remote at GitLab. I've worked across the spectrum of remote for 14 years. And in this show we want to share some of the best practices that we've learned here at GitLab as an all remote team, as well as talk to other amazing, interesting and insightful people from across the industry to share their perspectives on remote. We know there's a lot of great content out there and we want ours to be as digestible, and as fun as possible. So with that, let's dive right in. Joining us today is Andrew, he's a solutions consultant at Sprinkler. I'm also told he's a plant parent, dedicated academic turn tech specialist and tattoo aficionado. Andrew, I love that you've described yourself as, and I quote, a PhD dropout turned uncompromisingly best in class social strategist specializing in consumer brands. I feel like we just needed some walking music to go along with that. So welcome, Andrew. Thanks for joining the show. Tell the audience a bit about yourself, what you do at Sprinkler and how long you've been working remotely. Yeah, sure thing. So thanks for having me. So as we already said, I am a plant dad. So you want to get a peek of my office background. I do have some plants are there. Certainly am a tattoo aficionado. But yes, I am a PhD dropout dropped out of my PhD. Very proudly about six, seven years ago and since then I've been working in the social and the social tech space. I work for Sprinkler now for the world's first unified front office platform for any kind of modern digital engagement you need. I've been working remotely kind of quasi remotely since last August, I went remote still working for professional services or an agency. And I've been full remote since January of this year. Okay, so still relatively new to that. Okay, so I've worked in co-located spaces. I've worked in hybrid remote scenarios and now at GitLab we have over 1200 people in over 65 countries all remote and they all have their own nuances and their own differences. I'm just curious what your kind of core takeaways are in going remote since January. Are there any things that you miss? Are there any things that you've discovered that you actually love more than you thought you would? And how is this impacting both your work, the people around you? And how much of it is tied to the current situation that we're in which for historical context is in the the back half of the COVID-19 pandemic which has essentially most of the world working remotely for those who can't work remotely. Yes, yeah, so my role starting in January, the old world as I like to call it. My role has been remote since the start. I'm full-time remote. I don't have an office here in Philadelphia where I live. My kitchen is my office. You know, I'll say I started working remotely in January and it has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. I did not realize that, you know, working remotely is a skill. There is a real difference between working at home and being at home. And it's kind of the responsibility of any successful remote employee to make sure you have the skills to bridge the gap between those. So I'll give you an example. So you know, I have my couch right behind me over there and when I had a job that involved more traditional commuting, I would work, I would commute, I would come home and I would kind of just lay on the couch on my phone and just do really unproductive things for an hour like Twitter, YouTube, just let my brain kind of melt from the day. And when I would work from home and then I would go on that couch four feet away and just kind of, you know, lay down, look at my phone, let it drop and hit my face a few times, I would kind of have this like creeping anxiety that would progress throughout the day. And I realized really quickly that that meant I had not successfully differentiated working from home from being at home. And so that's just one like kind of microcosm of what it was like to adjust to working from home. Now I'll say I had reached a really good balance right before this all kind of hit the COVID thing hit and it's kind of all been on lockdown. The first few weeks I did a really great job at getting dinner with a friend after work, booking myself a workout class so that I had to go and I couldn't just lay on the couch for an hour. I put a lot of effort into leaving my apartment, leaving where I work so I could kind of trick my brain into thinking, oh, you commuted, you're not working anymore, you're switching that part of your brain off. So I think, you know, successful remote workers really need to put that time in to trick your brain into actually thinking, OK, I've left work. Even though I'm going four feet away, I went on a walk around the block or I just went upstairs for a few minutes and I completely separated myself. So I said that's one very small example of the effort I've had to put in to learn the skill of being a remote worker. Yeah, it's very interesting in that you can't just go from the office into home and just think that everything is going to be the same. Unconsciously, you actually worked a lot of habits and rituals into your day when you were commuting back and forth. And that actually provided some structure and rigidity to your brain of, OK, I'm here now, I'm here now, and this helps compartmentalize. When that line is blurred very suddenly, it can be jarring and disorienting. And actually, we just ran a social media poll and for those of you that don't follow us, be sure to follow that. We'll be teaming up another poll soon to see who all now is working remotely in the wake of COVID-19. And we had almost 2,000 responses and we had 87% say that more than half of their team is currently working remotely. And a lot of people actually replied on top of that and said 100% of our team is remote, which means there's a lot of people that have been thrust into their homes for the first time and maybe their home isn't necessarily amenable to remote work or they haven't had any planning or preparation to remote work. And that fits in perfectly with the theme of this week's webcast, which is managing work, whether that's an individual contributor or as a team leader from our homes and instead of our office desk. And one thing that I recommend for people that are used to having a commute is to plan something in their calendar with the time they used to spend commuting, whether that's sleeping more, whether that's reading, whether that's cooking, cleaning, doing anything. If you plan it in your day, it helps you kind of mentally ramp into the day and ramp out instead of letting work or something else to sort of consume it. And then it's just this one unambiguous blob of a day. And we talked a little bit earlier, one of the interesting perks of remote work that now we're kind of getting on the second order of once you're stabilized, why should you keep working remotely? What's in this for companies? What's in this for team leaders? What's in this for your own kind of mental health and mental sanity? And we had touched on something that I found really interesting, which is remote helps you replace the charade with actually doing good work. And I think this may be a bit of a taboo topic, but I think it is worth diving into so much of what we have experienced in an office environment. There's a certain amount of pomp and circumstance. There's a reason why people dress a certain way and they check a piece of themselves at the door every day so that you kind of get the worker, but not really the actual individual. And in a remote setting, that subjectivity doesn't really have a place. You have to measure metrics, you have to measure results. And what you look like on a given day really has no bearing on any of that. And you and I were saying it's a massively liberating thing to embrace because you spend a lot of mental cycles on the quote unquote charade and it does no one any good. And I think we all kind of realize that in remote kind of gives us all permission to say, look, the charade is out the window. Let's spend our mental cycles on something more creative. So how have you seen that play out and what truth have you seen in that? Yeah, you know, that's that's been really critical for me. I mean, I'd say, right, you go to an office. You do worry about you do worry about what you're wearing. And it almost feels like every day we wake up and we're almost preparing a little bit for a role, right? Like and it's dependent on like, OK, I'm Andrew Gearing for a promotion today or I'm Andrew and I'm going to go above and beyond. And you you base so much of your thoughts and your actions preparing for that. And it's just so unnecessary. Like I feel like the covid and everyone going remote has really revealed that like it actually never mattered. It never once mattered what you look like if you were the first person or the last person in the office. It never mattered if you were checking CNN while your boss walked behind your monitor and your boss so that you were checking CNN. Those things that we worry about throughout the day to day simply never mattered. And so for me, I've been able to take all those extra thoughts that I would I would previously worry about. And one, I can just focus on doing deep work. Like I can just focus on muting slack, not looking at my emails and just working for an hour or two at a time and just doing my best work possible in an environment that I'm very comfortable in my own home. And so that's been really critical. I mean, there have been a few adjustments, right? We're now a lot of us are working remotely. I'd say the number one thing I've found is that as folks are working from home, some folks are in their sweatpants, right? Some folks are they have a kid screaming in the background, which is fine. It shows that we're all human. What I want everyone to embrace a little bit more is that we're all human, right? Like we're all working from home. And I think a side effect of that is we can get significantly less productive because we get caught in these really stupid long slack or email chains because we're trying to avoid we're trying to avoid calling someone, right? Because we don't want them to know it's 10 a.m. And maybe I just woke up and my voice is so little groggy. Or maybe I'm not wearing a shirt. Maybe I'm wearing sweatpants, right? And what I want people to what I encourage people to do is to just like get past that a little bit. Just just pick up the phone and call or give someone a video chat because that lets you balance the best of both worlds. It lets you balance those micro interactions that you used to have in the hallway with just focusing on doing deep work and not focusing on the charade of the theatrics of being in the office. Though those are the things that I've really loved. And ultimately saving that energy of what I used to do with, you know, what Andrew, am I today? What role am I playing? Let's focus on playing the role of being in the office. I can one focus that on just doing better work. But also working remotely in that sense has been a God sent for my mental health as someone who overthinks a lot. And I overthink, you know, the interactions I might have, like what was on my monitor when my boss walked behind me. How did I interact with that person? It's just the great equalizer in that sense. And it lets me not worry about those things and just do good work. It's so well said. Remote, I think, is largely democratizing work in a huge way. I've been asked by talent leaders that suddenly have hundreds or thousands of employees that are all distributed all over the world. What should I do to ensure that the bonds remain, that there are good relationships between them? And it's an interesting question because there are certainly some intentional things you can do. Get Lab, we do things like happy hour, social hours. We recently did a talent show where we had over 130 people in six continents doing crazy talents on Zoom. And we actually had a panel of judges and prizes were given out. It was very elaborate, very well thought out. So we can do things like that. But just the simple fact of interacting with executives and leaders in their homes and seeing that, oh, they're their homeschooling kids too. Oh, their dog actually barks at FedEx as well. It's this great equalizer to your point where it democratizes things. And I think one of the main things we should get from this is allow ourselves to enjoy that for so long. We've put up a face or put on a face. Now we have permission to not do that. Let's just admit that we're humans first, colleague, second. We're kind of all in this together. That allows you to spend your mental energy on things that are more important. And it also allows you to empathize more with each person you interact with, which helps you get work done. There are less preconceived notions of why is this person struggling? Why is this person not getting back with me? Well, take a look at what's going on. And that will help you empathize and understand and also offer a helping hand. We've seen people come together in a big way. So even though they're more isolated, they're actually coming together in a more powerful way. Yeah, I hope people lean into that. And I think we're reaching this point where teams have stabilized enough that they're starting to look at, OK, what are the benefits? What are the opportunities here now that were in this environment? And you did mention that one of the perks of being remote is it's easier to get deep focus time. It's easier to just put your head down, plow through work and then make time for other things. But one thing that I've seen is that it's also easy to never look up. It's also easy to just get in a work mode and kind of forget that you need to get out of it at some point. And so I do want to touch on the topic of avoiding burnout, being self aware of setting your own boundaries. But I want to take a deeper dive in this of beyond the surface. You and I were talking all fair on some of the concerts that we've seen throughout the years. And I had seen some crazy concerts that I remember that were like defining moments in my life that happened on a Tuesday or a Wednesday night that would have been fundamentally impossible to arrange to do if not for the flexibility of remote work and the notion of working asynchronously and being able to schedule my day in a nonlinear way that I could get work done, but also travel and also be in these places. I've been able to kind of unlock a lot of opportunities. I think remote is one of life's great cheat codes. So how does that play into it, structuring your life that you're taking advantage of the opportunity of being remote and allowing that to be part of what helps you prevent burnout? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is, you know, it's just it's more of removing the charade, I think, right? If I go run three miles during my lunch break, no one's going to care that 45 minutes after I was last seen in the office, my hair is wet, right? Because I just went on a run and took a quick shower. And I think, you know, when the when the world kind of goes back to normal, I think what we're going to realize is that and it goes back to what I was saying with doing deep work, too, is that. You you likely don't need to be reached right now. Unless something is genuinely actually on fire, you likely do not need to be reached right now. And I think that's a matter of as we're all remote, maybe just while we're evaluating all of all of the things we do in terms of our workload, all of our behaviors, I think we should pay special attention to. Is this actually critical or is it just critical to my workflow? Did I plan this as well as I could? And the answer when we take a step back and start to evaluate that is very few things in our work are critical. If you're on this, if you're on this, you are likely not a doctor. People do not live and die by your output, by the work you do. And so I think I think you bring up a really great point in that if we actually plan our work accordingly and we can actually start to differentiate ourselves, do I really need this person's attention right this second? And it doesn't involve my productivity or my workflow. We can start to restructure not only how like where we work, but how we work and to take advantage of more important things than work. And I want to make sure I let the gravity of that sentence hang for a second. More important things than work because there are a lot of things that are much more important than work. 100% agree. I think one of the benefits of this great global pause is it allows people to take a personal health check on how tightly they've allowed their own personal identities to be woven into the actual act of going to and from this office, this building. How much of you allow this building to define who you are? Because the truth is you're more than that. You're more than whatever this building was. You're more than that, that nine to five commute. I love to tell this story, but if you took tally marks and you put them on the front and back of one sheet of paper, that's all you would get before you ran out of weekends in the average human lifespan. That's it. One sheet. Yeah. So if you're allowing your work to define everything, that's always the first priority and the commute owns everything, you essentially have one sheet of weekends to live for, which sounds like a pretty raw deal to me. So it doesn't matter if you're an individual contributor, a team leader, an executive, a founder. We're all worth more than that. And the freedom and flexibility that comes with remote, what we've seen at GetLabs is if you give people the ability to live their lives first and then work, work into it, they end up giving back in a massive way. It's not like you're going to get shafted by by doing this. If you hire the right people, they're managers of one that can appreciate that autonomy and they have the ability to manage their own time. They end up giving back to the business. It's a it's a win-win. You'd mentioned some things on some tips and tricks for for individuals, but I'm curious what your view on how much of that is dependent on the company being supportive of the company creating a non-judgmental culture, of the company creating an atmosphere where work can happen asynchronously so you don't have to be always on synchronously looking at Slack messages. I feel like you can get a certain amount of this done as an individual and then kind of the last mile or two that gate has to be lifted up by a company and a team that is supportive of that. Yeah, I'd say I agree and I disagree. I think it's always helpful when a company that you work for supports an initiative, whether that be a business initiative or a cultural initiative. But at the same time as as remote employees, there's a there's a significant degree of things that we can do, whether that. Well, it's typically culturally, right? So let me give you an example. My last job, no one talked about mental health ever. I was the first person to say, I'm taking a mental health day or was the first person to put in my Slack status, meditating to address my mental health. That is something you can do as a remote employee. That's super simple. And not only does it help improve your culture, it gives cover to everyone who also wants to do that, who also needs to do that. At the same time, like I'm incredibly lucky to work for sprinkler because we have some structural things that we do to help us. So I'll give you some examples. Sprinkler has a wellness coach and I'm sorry, three times a day for 15 minutes at 9 a.m. noon and 9 p.m. We have a group meditation. So we hop on the line and it's a guided meditation. That's incredibly helpful during lunch at 12 30 and 5 30. We have coaches to do virtual workouts with us together. And while that is great, that sprinkler does that. And I feel incredibly supported. If you're listening to this and you think, man, like, I wish I had that. Bro, can you send the calendar invite? Because if you can send the calendar, just do it. Like if you want to lead a 15 minute guided meditation for your team or a broader department, just do it because the chances are someone else needs it too. It's such a great point in the absence of leadership lead. And I found that a lot of talent leaders right now want their employees to be the change because there's so much going on. They might not know to do something like that. And it can be as simple as sending the calendar invite or starting the Slack channel or just being the impetus. Because to your point, if you're thinking about it, chances are high that other people are looking for similar opportunities. And I wanted to talk actually a little bit about our work spaces. And this goes hand in hand. I was sharing off there that I recently moved the location of my office. I was in a room downstairs, like right in the front door where all of the foot traffic was going to and fro. And I didn't really notice that it was negatively affecting me until I moved upstairs. So now I have to physically walk up a set of stairs to be at work. And then when I physically walk down the stairs, there's this very clear mental click that happens that you left work. It's up there. You can now fully engage with life and mentally close the tabs in the web browser that is your brain. And I was shocked at how much of a difference it made. I've worked remotely for over a decade. I feel like I had it fairly well dialed in. But it goes to show that, hey, even 14 years later, iteration on homework spaces and just kind of the way you do things can be useful. So you're in a very different situation where you have a very small space. Feel free to show us around or just give us some advice for anyone that is in a similar situation where they're limited on space, but they want to create that separation. Yeah, sure. So first of all, please excuse my MacBook Pro clunky camera work. But I have a very small space. I'm a young urban professional. I live in a very small loft, just like you'd imagine someone covered in tattoos wearing floral shirts would. So you'll see, you know, so I have my desk. It's a fairly small desk. If you're looking for kind of like a remote worker pro tip for your desk. This is a coffee warmer. It can also be used for tea. That was life changing when I got my coffee warmer. But I have a pretty small desk. You'll see, like as I pan around, like that's the rest of my living space. That's the couch that I used to chill out on for an hour. And then, you know, what's behind me is my kitchen. And so, you know, Darren, you have your stairs. Unfortunately, I'm going to have a flight of stairs up to my to my bedroom. But in terms of like this is the space if I'm not in bed. I cook here, I relax here and I work here. And so you were talking about your stairs. You know, I had one day, I think it was two weeks ago, maybe the week the week before where I just had a stressful day. Right. I had a stressful day. I went on a run outside to differentiate. I came back and I just like it still wasn't enough to separate. It wasn't. And so what I want to encourage everyone. A lot of people might be thinking like, dude, I work in my kitchen counter and working on the couch. Like I'm just making do with whatever space I have because I don't have a dedicated space. That's fine. But sometimes you have to get creative. So my creativity, because I don't have another space to hang out in, I put a towel over my desk. I put a towel over the monitor because even though I shut my computer and I put it in my backpack so I can't see it, even I'm just going to take it out of the backpack tomorrow. I still put it away so I don't look at it, even just like the computer monitor, the keyboard and the chair. It was too much. It just still wasn't enough to separate. So sometimes you just have to get creative and sometimes you just have to put a towel on your desk, even if your boyfriend comes over and looks at you like you've finally snapped. I love that. You know, sometimes it's the simplest things. For me, it was a set of stairs for you. It's a towel. I actually had a guest on earlier that said they actually bought two chairs. There was a work chair and a non-work chair. And you only sat in the work chair when work was happening. And if you sat in the other chair and told your brain, work cannot happen here. You can't think about work. You can't engage with work. You have to physically get out of the chair and move to another chair if you want to engage with work. And those are some of the simple forcing functions that any remote worker can look to to help create that that line of delineation. Andrew, this has been fascinating, man. I loved it. Thank you so much for being a guest. Where can our audience get in touch with you on the worldwide interwebs? Yeah, sure thing. If you're a if you're a LinkedIn user, you can just find me at LinkedIn slash Andrew archizer. If you're a Twitter user, you can follow me on Floral Andy. If you're so inclined, but I'm around. If you have questions about remote work, I'm really passionate about this. I'm really passionate about documenting my journey, because, like I said, it's it's a skill that has to be learned. I love that. I love your floral shirt as well. I was this close to wearing my Aloha shirt and I didn't do it. But but I should have like any express the Aloha spirit, you should. Yeah, for the audience. Thank you so much for joining us. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and tweet us questions at and get lab and we're trying to work those into the next episode. Be sure to go to all remote info to download our remote playbook and sign up for our newsletter and get a heads up on episodes like these. We can't wait to talk more soon until then. Stay cozy. Be excellent to one another. Aloha and.