 I'm thrilled to welcome to the stage Yob Vandervort and Marcello Lebrie, the co-founders of Remote. We know there are many advantages of embracing remote work, but to get there, we have to get the basics right first. Yob and Marcello have extensive experience in remote work, leadership, and practice, and their company has really been a pioneer in remote collaboration and communication. They now have employees in dozens of countries across six continents, so they know how to tackle the complexities that can arise with a global workforce. If your team is wondering how to best hire in other countries, how to design processes that will work across time zones, and even how to gauge performance, you're going to get your questions answered during this session. Let's listen in. All right, we're live. Well, this is interesting, Marcello. We talk every single day, but now the rest of the world gets to see us talk to each other. We have to censor ourselves a little bit. Before we start off, let's start with the introduction. I'm Yob. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Remote. Marcello, CEO and co-founder at Remote. Maybe to start what we can do is I can tell a little bit about why we started Remote and how it came to be. You can correct all my mistakes and exaggerations. In January 2009, before Remote, we were at different companies, and actually I was at GitLab. I joined GitLab when it was approximately when it was founded. Of course, as everybody that is listening to this knows, GitLab has a fully distributed team. One of the things we struggled with at GitLab was exactly that. We would hire someone in a country who never hired someone before, and we then had to figure out, well, how do we pay that person? How do we stay compliant? How do we provide benefits? What I saw was that doing that, one, was a huge pain for everybody involved, and the experience was never really, really good. Any vendors that helped out with that were generally quite poor. After five years at GitLab, which I thought was sufficient amount of time, even though it was an amazing company, this is me sucking up to the organizers of the event, we decided to start a company together specifically to solve that problem. Remote today exists for that purpose. We make it possible for you as an employer or as an employee to hire anybody anywhere in the world. It means that we, as remote, we have local entities all throughout the world. There we act as an employer of records, so that let's say you want to hire Jane in Portugal. Remote Portugal hires Jane. We provide payroll and benefits and everything else that comes with that. Then we need invoice the actual employer, so for example, GitLab. For GitLab, the problems are solved in terms of how do we stay compliant, how do we provide benefits. For Jane, it's a nice situation as well because we're an experienced employer, so we just take care of everything and it's generally a good experience. That's what Remote does in quite a few countries now since about two and a half years ago. What did I miss, Marcel? Anything? They also look good. It's a good thing about the team. It's been quite incredible because we served all this before this crazy time, all this that we hear and feel about the pandemic. It was already very much for a lot of companies and people, the reality. The need was more than there. We've seen it become a trend way before we started Remote, but the current situation of the world was a catalyst for all of this. I feel that all this, all the remote work, the remote company is very much bringing the future work to today, actually our customers. It feels quite good to be a part of all this as well. I think the nice thing is what we saw at GitLab already was that the benefits of remote work and being a distributed company are so incredibly large. Over the past year and a few months, I think most of the world had started to work from home, forced to work from home, and now slowly people are finally able to experience remote work without feeling you have to be locked at home. I think it's still a long way to go, but remote work during a pandemic is not the kind of remote work that I was lucky to experience, and the reason why we started the company, because there's so many benefits to it, it's really incredible. Marcel, that's why we started Remote. Do you want to tell a little bit about our company, like the kind of company we have in terms of culture? Yeah, there are a few things that were paramount when we started this, right? We wanted to build something that truly mattered, that allowed companies to have a full world of possibilities, higher people for, rather than just locality, and people around and on the same country or similar geographies, and also for people, to empower people, whatever they are in the world, independently of how the country is doing, and to get a good, great job, as if they were in places like, I don't know, New York, London, San Francisco, you name it. And you can only do this if you realize the difference that exists in the world, the diversity and the needs for inclusivity and all similar topics. So if you're building this for people, if you're building this so that people can have the future of work becomes something where people actually enjoy life, rather than live to work, it has a fundamental embody that, right? So we set up five very fundamental values at the beginning of our journey, kindness, ownership, ambition, transparency, and excellence. Now these may sound like buzzwords, but the truth to the matter is that these are not company values. These are people values. We chose those because they represent what we feel that the future of work should be and how the future of workplaces should behave in a way and enable people and promote people to do, to live better lives. And that was the core, I believe, of what we set out to do. I think when we started, when we were two, it was quite easy. Now at 250, I can say that it's a lot harder. It's not. I think that it resonates a lot with people, even people that were in companies that were not very transparent or kind, but these are, again, human values. And so it's very easy for people to relate to and to also want to keep them because we all know what it feels like to work in places without those values. And if the future of work is whatever we want it to be, then surely it can summarize what we feel like, and those values are that in a way. I think the interesting thing is that when you tell people, well, one of our values is kindness, everybody responds with, wow, that's so great. And then they join and they say, like, it really is true. And it's just a little bit sad that that is what people are surprised by because it's such an incredibly low threshold to get to that point. Your job is in the end just a job. And so let's make it nice. You spend a lot of hours, maybe eight hours, five days a week. That's a lot of time. You really want to make sure that that time at least you spend feeling challenged in the right ways and other than that, having a comfortable relationship with your colleagues. And yeah, I think that's at least for me, kindness is one of the values that I'm, there's no compromises made to that ever. You can always be kind to people, especially because all we're talking about is business and technology. There's no reason ever to not be kind to your colleagues. So yeah, I think it really helped for us to build the business, stooled on those things. First one, those really strong values, the fact that we're distributed, that whenever we can hire, we will hire. We make a point out of hiring there. We don't specifically look for people in a particular region or the site. We're going to expand to a particular territory. And the nice thing, of course, for us is that we're able to build and use our own product in doing so. So we have hundreds, not thousands of customers by now that do exactly the same thing. I don't think that's very exciting because what we see is that people start to, and companies start to hire from anywhere. They say, well, we can hire you wherever remote can help us. And in doing so, they built really nice organizations, very diverse organizations in almost every sense of the word. And I think you see that the remote as well, where we have quite a diverse organization. And that's not because we put particular emphasis on it in terms of, in almost any way, I think the only thing we do is we just look for great people wherever they are. And then if you hire those people, you're going to end up with a really diverse organization, which is really, really nice. And it helps a lot with all the other parts as well, with all the other values. Yeah, I agree. I think in the old excuse of, I mean, the team all looks the same because we just hired locally. It's no longer the case. You have a full world of possibilities of people you can hire and you can meet. And that will increase the productivity and the different values within the company and bring so much richness to the culture and into discussions. That's just, it's unmeasurable. It's insane. It's a totally different world, I'd say. So for remote work, I think fundamental is working asynchronously. Why is it absolutely necessary? Because people live in different time zones. There's no magical cure to time zones. We can't all work the same nine to five. That's going to horrible break. And besides that, I don't like to work nine to five. I like to work whenever I feel like working and not at the moments where I don't. So asynchronous work. Marcello, what is it? Why is it? How do you do it properly? Yeah. So, I mean, it seems like a very big ugly word. And also, we've seen lately being thrown around for a lot of different reasons. But essentially, it is to understand that you can depend on people always to be online working with you at the same time. And that it's the opposite of you working someone coming by and say, hey, do you want to chat about this and putting it on the back? And then you have to take your headset, look very upset and smell other people as well. And so the async work allows you to plan the work according to your availability, making sure that some things you do on your own because it's just the nature of most jobs. And the other things that you need to collaborate on, you can plan ahead when you're going to collaborate on. So you will not assume if people are online or not. I mean, we could be in the same time zone, but we have kids. So we know how much that changes your time zone and availability. And so the async way of working allows you to exactly space out in time your slots where you can be highly productive, when you're going to work alone, when you're going to need others. And also make sure that everyone is always in the flow, in sense that if you want to block a point of time to just work on something, you can do so. And if the other person you depend on to do some tasks also needs something done, you can both do that and then eventually come together to build something. So the asyncness way of working is not just a way to increase productivity because it respects people's needs and time, but it's more inclusive. You don't make assumptions if someone is working just at nine to five. I don't know. It depends on the country, the culture. Some people love to work like straight on and it's fine. Other people do prefer to take breaks and do life. And that's perfect as well. We just do different things and we are fundamentally different. And for that reason, async work is one of the core tenets of remote work. We have people distributed all over the world. On top of that, most of these people work from home. And we know there's a lot of distractions. There's animals and pets and things happening and the male person coming in, cleaning person and barging in and things like that. And so we know that you can't always be on at your peak productivity. And so what is the point, for instance, what is the point of you being at work when you don't feel like, when you don't feel productive, where you're wasting three hours to do something you usually take 10 minutes, right? Just take a break to go do you. And then you come back later and you're super productive in those five minutes, five, 10 minutes. And that's the basics of async work. It's not magical. It's just respectful. I think the nice thing is that if you work asynchronously well, or to be able to work asynchronously well, you have to trust people. You have to give them ownership. And you have to give them independence because you have a task. And if you get stuck on that task, you have to be able to, or you get stuck at a moment of decision, a fork in the road, for example. You have to be able to give people the trust and the ownership that they actually take that decision themselves and not wait on other people. Otherwise, it's impossible to work asynchronously, right? And this is what you see in offices where, you know, I come into a fork in the road to my work. I can just, and this is what would happen, of course, I would walk over to someone, to my boss or my manager, I would wave them over and say, what do I do? Go left or right? And then if you work asynchronously, that person, one, you don't really want to ask them. But even if you wanted to, they might be asleep, or they might be at the gym or whatever else. And so if you give people trust and ownership, then they will have to make, and they will make the decision themselves. And I think the interesting thing here is that if you think about this a lot, that the overhead of waiting for consensus or even just waiting for approval of a peer might be, and probably is significantly more expensive than the cost of reverting a decision that they make wrongly. Because usually people don't make the wrong decision, right? Usually they have a good idea about the direction. There's very little situations, which is actually like the toss of the die, where depending on the outcome, it might be one or the other. Usually there's something weighted and then a person can just make a decision comfortably or sometimes just based on taste, for example, can be a million different things. And I think that makes remote work. And I always say this, remote work is such a great forcing function for good habits, because you're forced to give people trust. You're forced to give people independence. And that just benefits everybody. No one likes to have someone looking over their shoulder and then helping them make or like putting out on their screen what to do and what decisions to be made. Everybody likes to just get work done, right? Get shit done. It's nice. You sit down, you make decisions, you go from beginning to end. And that doesn't mean that you can't work together with colleagues. It's a very different thing in and of itself. You can do that and there's no reason you can't do that remotely. But when you just want to get stuff done, it feels much nicer if you don't feel the need to constantly get approval or get sign-offs. And then when there's moments where you do have that, then you have to organize your work in a way that if you actually get locked or you're actually running up to a review moment, right? Like in code, if you want to merge something, you are going to assign it to someone so that they can review your merge request. That's a very natural point to get there. And then the person has to have enough ownership to say, oh, I'm going to pick up this other task or I'm going to start working on something else while I wait for my colleagues to wake up, get back from the supermarket and review my merge request. And so you have this really strong forcing function towards trust, towards ownership that ultimately benefits everybody in almost any situation. And it has very little downsides because if you do want to work together, if you do want to, even like sitting together or like directly collaborating or just casually to do, you know, we're all working, but we are talking with each other, you can do all of those things online as well. So she gets so much more for free. So I think that's, that is one of my favorite things about remote work is that you can have it all. Yeah. Well, one of the things that people ask very often, people, especially people that never were actually working saying is that, what does that do to the culture of the company, the team? And it's quite interesting to see that the assumption is, well, it's just people working on different things. The cultural will be quite damaged and it's quite the opposite because when people decide to share time and a call or a hangout session, it is deliberate. It's not like, well, I have to go. I was having a coffee and someone came in and I'm going to have to chit chat because I'm having my coffee. No, it's fundamentally deliberate. There's also something that is impactful. The fact that what you see here, this is my life. I mean, my house, the things that go by that there's a kid running around or my dog making noises. There's always my life story behind it. And so what is shared, it is more powerful. It is more deliberate. And the impact on the company is that you actually build more sincere environments and serve in no bullshit because if you don't want to hang out with someone, you just don't open the Zoom call or don't join a session because you're doing what you want to be doing at that time. And that empowers everyone, yourself as an individual, the team, and ultimately the company. Because what you want is to create an environment where everyone is welcome to either just focus on work, share if they feel like sharing, or not sharing because we all have our days and sometimes we don't really feel like sharing. And I think that is very, it is different. It's not better or worse than working in an office. It's just fundamentally different. I think the biggest key to bringing remote work into the future of work is accepting that it's just fundamentally different. It's a different reality. Yeah, the relationship with work sort of changes in the sense that if you don't want it to be the epicenter of your social life, it doesn't have to be so. And you're not forced in a situation where it is so. If you do want to socialize a lot with your colleagues, and I think we see this at remote where we have many colleagues that do get together very regularly, also in person, but also online and they hang out and they work together. But then we have many other colleagues that don't do that and that prefer to just do work and then live the rest of their life. Which is, it sounds, I don't know how it sounds, but I like the idea that the relationship with work doesn't have to be like, as you said in the beginning, life shouldn't revolve around work. Like work should be a facet of your life and maybe an important facet of your life that is up to you, but nonetheless should be facet of your life and not dictate where you live, when you live, where you live. You know, I think that's such an antiquated idea, even though that's basically been the status quo for the past hundreds of years. The fact that you can switch houses, look, countries even without having to worry about like your income, your family or your safety. It is, I think it's sometimes prices, in some cases prices. Yeah, yeah. I moved between countries when I was working at GitLab and then just a few weeks ago, I moved again between countries and in and of itself is a pain. It's really nice that nothing about your work situation changes. Like it just stays completely the same. And then the last little bit about bureaucracy and law, legal, that is what our company solves. So that's the last little thing. I think maybe interesting to get into it is like a last subject here. I hear very often, okay, but how do you do everything remotely? Sure, but like how do you make sure people do their work well? How do you train people? How do you manage performance? And I think notoriously, there are several organizations that have to start to really track their employees. And I know if you're on TikTok, you might have seen videos of people attaching like a mouse to a fan so that a mouse is always moving. So it looks like someone is online and having activity. I think we don't have to tell anybody. That's not the way to deal with performers, but you, Marcel, as a leader of many engineers and other people, how do you manage performance in a remote team? Yeah, like I think there's some misunderstanding about what performance is within the context of work. A lot of the use case is mostly binary. You're either achieving what you're supposed to or not, right? Now, you only should get into measuring things when something is off. Like your customers aren't happy. You're not delivering what you thought you should be delivering or something is happening that is not supposed to be. Like in that case, it's worth looking into. Other than that, it's just not. Now, often the case for not having the expected performance is not on the employee. Like I'd say 99% is not on the employee. It is about the expectations that were set. The employer did hire that person. They are supposed to know they've done their due diligence, understanding if there was a good match between the job and the person. And setting the person up for success is key to that relationship. Now, we do know that sometimes things fail and some mismatches happen, well, such as life. And then you employ whatever you need to employ them. Or you're planning to work with the person to get up to specs. Or you understand that the work that you're expecting is completely off. And you have to adjust that to the team that you have and the people and to your business as well. Now, having been a manager and this is my probably seventh team, I believe, there's no difference. There's absolutely no difference. What I've seen in the past is that offices can detract way more than working in sync. For the single fact that when someone is in the flow, like focused on working on something, there's always something happening. Someone getting up, getting a coffee, asking if you want to also get a coffee or someone wanting to show you cat pictures. And all that is way more distracted. They commute and all that. It tracks a lot of energy. And then it is way trickier to understand if the problem behind performance comes from the relationship between the job, the expectation of the person, or from anything else, like the environment, the whatever. And I think that with remote work, you can remove away all those variables that happen around it and focus on the problem if you have it or on the great results if you have them as well. I think one of the interesting things here is that when employers say, how do I know people are actually doing the work? I always question what is the work that you're doing that you don't know that your employees are actually performing any work? It should be really obvious whether they are creating value or not. Things should break or things should not happen if they are not working, rather than you tracking whether they're moving their mouse. It should be actually having value. If you have a manager with, let's say, up to 10 reports or so, that manager should be able to at least have an idea of what is happening with each one of these people and whether they have been absent completely or not. It really baffles me to see this. In almost any situation, even in a situation where you have one manager with many, many reports, like in a call center, for example, it's very obvious that there's going to be a change in capacity in a team if someone is completely not doing their work. So it really baffles me that employers find the need to track people when you can just literally look at their work. Do your basic minimum thing as a manager, which is very similar to what you were referencing, which is people that consider themselves great managers in offices many times are not great managers in offices. They are just people that like to look over the shoulder and observe the physical behavior of people in the office. And that's a very different thing. I don't think that's managing. I don't think that is enabling your team. I think that's just being a bit of an ass. And again, remote work is such a good forcing function for this, because it becomes super obvious what is a good manager, who is a good manager and really who isn't. Great. Anything else to share, Marcel? I think we're out of time. I think we're out of time. Yeah. Very nice. Thanks, everybody. If you want to know more about remote, remote.com, it's very easy. And then if you Google our names, you'll find us on Twitter. You can ask us anything there. Bye, everybody.