 Hey, I just got off the phone with Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, and here are his biggest tips for working remotely in teams. Jason Fried and his company have been pioneers when it comes to remote working for years and years and years, years before also this coronavirus crisis where now everyone is going remote. I wanted to talk to the source, I wanted to talk to the person who had the most information about how to work in a fully distributed team, and I asked him every question I had on my mind when it came to putting my team fully remote and also to help other companies that we're working with how they can go fully remote, asked him everything there was to know and he answered and gave me some amazing information. So if you're wondering about remote working, if you're looking for remote working tips, you're going to love this video. Jason, thanks so much for jumping on this call to chat about remote work, which I think everyone right now, everyone has it on their plate. And yeah, welcome. Thanks for having me on again. Good to see you. So I'm going to start off with a kind of broad question, and this is also to help me, it's a selfish question. What do you think, I mean, you know, a lot of companies right now are going from having worked together in person for years and years and years, and that's how they that's the way they did work, and that's how they got stuff done. Now they're being forced to move to remote teams. What do you think leaders, like myself, for example, can do to make this transition a little less messy? Yeah, a few things. First of all, you got to be very understanding right now. Like it's not even a transition. It's a scramble for a lot of people, right? Like, wow, the office is closed. We've never worked this way. You could you buy a thousand tools or one tool doesn't like it's a scramble. People like aren't you so so just understanding that it's a scramble and that people don't really know what to do. It's kind of no different than throwing, you know, I've been using this analogy because I think it's pretty appropriate. Like, if you threw a guitar in someone's hands and they never played guitar before, you would never expect them to be good at guitar. There's like, nobody would expect them to be good at guitar. And you need to practice for a while. And I think that's kind of true here is like it's it's not quite as true because working remotely and working locally, let's call them 50 percent different. They're not like it's not like a completely foreign concept, but it does shake things up in a way where I think it's important for leaders to be accommodating, to be understanding, to even spend a week or two saying like, we're not really going to be able to like really work for a week or two. We're just going to be getting used to this for a week or two. You know, that would be a nice initial thing to do. So I would expect that the other thing I would I would suggest is this is maybe a little bit selfish, but I'd be careful not to throw a bunch of different products at people right now, yeah, because it's a scramble. And now people have to get used to using four or five or six different products to work together. And it's like, well, where do I put this? And where do I put that? And I don't know where things are and I don't know where to look and I don't know what to do. It's like, don't give too much. Don't give people too much to be overwhelmed by. So like, of course, I'd always throw a plug in for base camp. It's an all in one product. That's all you need. But whatever you choose to use, even if you use three separate things, fine, but don't use four. You know, like, just try to limit the, the onboarding impact right now around people because the more places you give people to put things and the more tools you ask them to use, the more chaos you're inevitably going to have to deal with. The other thing I would say is that people at home right now with kids have an extremely difficult time. Yep. You have two kids. You might even hear one of them screaming in the background. You'll hear a mind screaming for sure. Yeah. So, so there's no such thing as a full-time parent or full-time worker right now with parents or with a full-time worker who's a parent right now. That's what I meant to say. So like, if you're full-time and you have kids at home, you're not putting in full-time day. It's just not possible. It's just not possible. So that's another thing I think it's important for business owners and leaders to understand is that like, people are basically going to be part-time for a little bit here until they figure things out, you know, and we wrote up a thing for our employees internally saying, look, everyone's going to find their own balance here. I don't know what it's going to be. It's not for me to tell you what it is. You find whatever balance works for you. And if it works for you, it works for us. You're still going to get paid full-time, but our expectations are going to be relaxed for a while. We know everyone's scrambling to figure this out. So at a high level, I think that's the important thing to do right now. So you guys are quite lucky that you've been remote. Well, since as long as I can remember, you wrote the book remote. And as you said, for your company, it was important that more than 50 percent of your staff were remote so that you can really truly be a remote company. Now companies like mine are being dumped into it, like being dumped into cold water. And one of the things we're struggling with and one of the things a lot of our clients are struggling with too is like, how do you make people? So getting, you know, I 100 percent agree with you. It's going to take a while to onboard people to working remotely. But there's also a bit of newfound loneliness from working at home. What sort of things do you guys do or what sort of things can you recommend to like keep people feeling like they're part of the company? Or I don't know, just just to not let people feel super isolated in the next few weeks and months. Sure. First off, and this is also kind of related to the first question, but I wouldn't try to simulate the office. So I think companies that try to simulate the office are making a big mistake, which means like, well, if we have meetings all the time in person, let's have meetings all the time. Just let's do them remotely. Let's let's get video or, you know, screen sharing or video chat stuff going all the time. Let's keep video. Let's keep cameras on all the time so we can see each other all the time. That's creepy. Some companies are doing this. Are you serious? Yeah. Oh, yeah. They have like persistent video chat on all day long. So everyone can see each other because that's what you do in person. You can see each other. This is a mistake. You don't want to try and do that. OK, but there are some things you can do. So one thing that we do as a company, this is just once a month, but perhaps now you can speed this up, you know, once a month's fine for us. But maybe for you, it might be once a week. Now we do something we call five by 12 in the five by 12. The reason it's five is five random people. And the reason it's 12 is once a month. OK, we picked five random people from from the company once a month to get on a video chat where we talk for an hour and we cannot talk about work. So it's just like, let's just shoot the shit about life, about what's on people's minds, about what's going on in everyone's life, whatever it is. And that's something that we do once a month. And it's a really nice way to kind of force a little bit of social interaction between people in a sort of a nice, organized way. It doesn't go on too long, but also has enough time for people to spread out and become comfortable for another. And it's also a great way to introduce people who don't really get to work with each other all the time, because your click is still going to be tight in a sense. But like, if you don't get to work with someone on the ops team very, very often or someone on support, very often, it's nice to be able to chat with them socially about stuff that has nothing to do with work in an organized way. So we do that once a month. You can maybe do that once every two weeks or once a week for a while, things like that. The other thing I would encourage people to do is to show people that business meetings don't happen so often, replace your next meeting with a social meeting. So do this five by 12. The next time you thought you were supposed to have a business meeting, just make it a social one instead. Another thing we do is, you know, we use Basecamp, of course, and Basecamp has a feature called automatic check-ins, which automatically asks questions on a regular schedule. And so we have a once a month, we ask people what books they're reading automatically every Monday morning. We ask people what they did this weekend. And typically it's really cool because people share a little weekend trips or visiting the grandparents or going to the petting zoo, which of course, like no one's doing right now, but people are still doing things. So there's some ways you can prompt people to talk a little bit about life. There's some video stuff you can do here and there. But what I would just really encourage people not to do is try to simulate the physical office space because it's not a good idea. It's not as good. It's actually worse. But maybe having a few scheduled social things would be a good idea. So I think also one of the things, sorry, one of the quick ones. Keep going. Yeah, it's just like. Recognize that isolation is a challenge even for practice companies like ours. Yeah, we've been working remotely forever. And we feel isolation to some people feel very isolated at times. Just letting people speak up about it. What you might want to do is set up a again, I'm talking about in base camp parlance, but whatever you use is fine. We might set up a project like we have a project called self care where people can go into that project and talk to one another about like things they're personally struggling with. And there's resources in that project as well. So we have text documents. We have a chat room. We've got some other things going on message board. So people can talk about this stuff with one another. And I think that that's a really important thing and as a leader, encouraging people to are creating a place for people to go talk about that because some people may not want to talk about this in front of everybody like in a workplace discussion. So if you just set another place aside where anyone can participate if they want, know that everyone who's in there is going to be supportive in offering suggestions. I think that's a really healthy thing to do. Just on that point, you as a leader or the leaders in your company, is there like something that you do to, you know, spot people who are struggling with the isolation of it? Or is it that you expect them to speak up about it? Is there something that you say to trigger them to really come to you? Because I know that could be something that they might find embarrassing. Certainly. We someone, I think it was I forget who wrote up this post a year ago, someone wrote up a really good post in base camp about feeling isolated and everyone came rushing to support them and help them. But it took them. Yeah, they had to trigger it. Right. And that's a hard thing to do for a lot of people. So I do think some people are going to do that. I think setting aside a project or a place or whatever for these kinds of conversations to happen is healthy. Just to begin with, from a company wide level to say there is a place for this, if you need help. We also have like a mental health benefit here at base camp where we give people time off for this. And also there's some support provided by professionals that can help people. But I do think it's incumbent upon like team leads or managers, depending on how your company is structured to know the people specifically who may struggle with this more than others and to reach out to them and go, hey, how's it going? How are you doing? I know this is especially a tough time. I know you've struggled with this in the past. Is there anything we can do, like how are you feeling? Is there anything we can do to help? Like, you know, you have to do that delicately, but I think people will appreciate that that someone's looking out for them. So I think it's just, but it's probably not like the CEO who may not know how everyone is, but the team leader or manager, someone should know their team pretty well and know the people who struggle with this and bring that up with the team. I think it's also sometimes really helpful for teams to talk about this. So not like the whole company, because now you're exposing yourself to people that you may not really have a tight relationship with, but maybe like the design team or the programmer team or the support team or whatever team or the ops team or data team or whatever teams you have. Those people have usually have a tighter relationship because they're working more closely together. And that sort of group comfort allows people to speak up more frankly with one another. And I think that's a really healthy thing to do, too. As teams are coming, I think there's been a, you know, storming phase for the last three weeks where, you know, companies are sending people home. People are freaking out, wondering how to work remotely slowly, but surely we've seen our clients coming back online and getting back into projects as the teams come down a bit. But what we have heard a lot, and I'd just love to hear your opinion on this because it's something you talk about a lot. We hear people saying, maybe let's just wait till we're all back in the office because this remote thing, like the basic thing they say is like remote working, remote collaboration just isn't as good as in-person work. You guys have obviously proven the opposite of that, you know, growing a super strong tech business with an almost completely remote team. What would you say for people who are right now are really pushing back on it but are likely to be stuck with it for quite a while anyway? Well, yeah. So first of all, you are going to be stuck with it for quite a while. So like one option is to put the whole business on hold, but that's probably not a good idea. So I look at this as an opportunity. You know, it's funny, like our industry is so into innovation. It's so into creating new solutions to old problems, to being creative. And then here you have people who are like, we can't work any other way but in-person, you know? It's like, aren't we a creative industry? Aren't we a creative people? Isn't software development and a lot of, I mean, and not everyone's doing software development, but a lot of people who watch your show and know you, website design, design work, software development, application development. Like these are creative endeavors. This is a creative moment. This is a moment to try and look at, it uses opportunity to redefine perhaps or explore a new way of working. This is a great moment because most things change is usually driven by events. And here's an event that we don't control. Use it to your advantage. Learn something new, try something new, discover something new, explore something new. So I would encourage that first of all. Second of all, yes, remote work is not as good as in-person work. If you work in-person all the time, of course, like you're gonna be used to that, but remote work has a lot of advantages, tons of advantages. And I would seek those out right now, giving people more time and attention to work on their own, having long stretches of time, uninterrupted time to themselves, being able to create an environment that you control that, well, I mean, to some degree, screaming children you don't control, but in some ways you actually have, even though you may have less control over that, you may have more control in other ways. So again, and I can go down the long list, but there's some real advantages right now. And also it's a great moment to check yourself and go, we can't collaborate remotely because we can't all be in a room together drawing on the chalkboard. Why do you need to do that all the time? Like maybe you don't need to do that all the time. Maybe what's better is you bring very well considered ideas to each other versus this idea of brainstorming from a blank slate. Maybe you all spend some time really thinking something through and really playing it through and then bringing very complete ideas to one another to begin to discuss those. Like that's how we do things. We don't ever just hop on a call with like blank brainstorm kind of stuff. We don't do that. We write things up in detail, we present ideas together and then we talk about them. And if we need to jump on a video conference at some point we do that too but there are different ways of working. So yeah, of course the new way is never gonna be as good as the old way if what you're used to is the old way. And anyway, if this was flipped, the scenarios are totally flipped and people forced us at Basecamp to go work in an office together, we would feel the same way. Like we can't work this way. Well, of course we can't in this short immediate term because we're not used to that but of course we can in the long term if we're open to exploring something new. So to me this is about familiarity. It's a little bit about adventure, like taking a chance here. It's about what people are comfortable with versus the unknown. But again, as an industry we're always asking people to do new things. If we're working with clients, clients come to us, we don't work with clients, but we did like some, and we're trying to push a new design on them, a new idea to them. We're trying to push them in a new direction. That's what they've hired us to do and they're reticent to do that. And now our industry is the reticent one to try something new. So it's just a good reminder that like, change is hard in general. What you're comfortable with is really hard to walk away from. But it's a real big opportunity here. And look, things will return to normal at some point. And maybe now what you'll end up having is a new skill. You'll have a skill where you, like you already know how to work locally, but now you'll have a skill which allows you to work remotely. That's a new skill. Who doesn't want new skills? Who doesn't want new opportunities? Who doesn't want new chances to learn something new and to get better? And to be more flexible and to be more resilient. That's the thing I think that's really important about remote work. It trains resiliency because I can work from it anywhere. David can work from anywhere. Our whole team can work from anywhere. That is a wonderful feeling to know that you can be anywhere at any time and not feel like you're missing a beat. That's resiliency. So that's the opportunity here. I think so too. I think a lot of companies are gonna realize that, we are half a consultancy and half a digital business. And when I bumped into you in Chicago is because I was doing a two day training which is like eight hours flight just to do that. And now we're starting to turn that into digital whiteboard sessions or Zoom calls. And it's like, wait, why weren't we able to do this before? It just seemed like it was impossible until we were forced to do it. Yeah, and this, exactly. And the great news here is that there's a lot of companies that before would never have allowed you not, or would say you had to fly in, right? And now they're gonna realize that you don't have to. And they still might want you to occasionally and there's nothing wrong with that. But everyone has more options now. And that's good optionality is good. It's good for everybody. So that's how I see this is an opportunity to learn something new and work a new way. I have to say, I agree. Obviously the health crisis and everything is terrible, but the actual potential outcomes of this, I'm super excited about. I'm not gonna keep you much longer. I just have one or two questions left. And then I wanna tell you also the behind the scenes of how I'm very slowly revealing to our audience how I bumped into you in Chicago. One sentence at a time, week over week. Literally one sentence at a time, people are loving it. Yeah, that was very unexpected. I didn't even think I was gonna do that. Then I decided like halfway through telling the story that I would just stop telling it and drag it out over a week. So it's been amazing. We have time right now, everyone has time. So you said before that your standard opening question is, I know your resume, I read your LinkedIn and what is something that I, what's something I won't know about you? So maybe in the context of this whole remote thing or maybe in the context of this whole situation that we're going through, is there anything you haven't put out there yet? Is there any information you haven't talked about publicly or anything that you guys are thinking about now seeing this crisis coming up that you could talk about? Yeah, I mean, we've sort of kind of talked about this, but not in detail. So, you know, we have this new product coming out soon called Hey, H-E-Y.com, new email thing. And we were set to launch at the end of April. And David and I have been noticing that we're seeing other companies launch things as if like nothing's changed in the world. And it feels a little bit distasteful in a sense. Like there's a real pandemic going on, people are dying, there's major crisis going on. And also our employees are stretched thin right now with other obligations at home or looking after elderly parents or whatever it is. And we made the decision to just postpone the launch, which is not what we wanted to do, but it's what made sense to do. And I think that companies ought to be thinking about, like this is not business as usual. Okay, don't stimulate the office and your plans are gonna change. It's okay, be flexible, this is a moment to be flexible. And I would just encourage most companies or more companies to look at curbing their ambitions right now and slowing down a little bit. And you can't, you're not gonna get the same stuff done you got before because you're not used to this because people don't have as much time and the things you've been planning on doing for a long time, those plans are gonna have to change for a little bit and it's fine. I think it's a really healthy moment. It's funny, it's a healthy moment for nature too for us, right? Like there's fewer planes in the sky, right? There's a whole lot less air pollution right now. Fewer cars on the road, like this is a good pause actually. I mean, it's clearly not if you're sick and all that obviously, right? It's dangerous right now around the world. But it's interesting how things happen when there's a pause. And you realize like, you didn't need to do that. You didn't need to fly that plane to get to that place, you could do this. Or this deadline you had, it's gonna slip a little bit and that's okay, even though you've been charging at it for a while, it's okay because what's worse is doing something that doesn't make sense in the current time because six months ago when you were projecting ahead, you thought it made sense. But everything's different now. So I don't know if this is kind of a more of a philosophical point of view, I guess, but like it's okay to push things off right now. It's okay to slow down right now. And it's also a good reminder that you can and everything is gonna be okay. Now, of course, if you're in the personal protection equipment industry and you're making masks and gowns and gloves and don't slow down, right? Like course, like there's certain industries where we need everyone all hands right now, obviously. But look, what you do, what I do, it doesn't matter that much in the whole scheme of things right now, like we can slow down a little bit and take care of our people in a different way and everything will return back to normal in a point. But this is just good practice again. It's good practice to slow down and go, it's okay. There, it's okay. So anyway, I don't know if that was new or whatever, but it's something I'd like to hear more about because one of the things that really frustrates me is I'm getting emails from people. People are reaching out to me on LinkedIn and they're saying like, my boss is making this charge as hard as we've ever charged right now because like business is struggling and I totally get that, but they're like, I've got kids at home, I can't do it. I don't know who to, I don't know what to do. And it makes me, I feel bad for everybody, including the boss, including the owner, I feel bad for everyone right now because they're trying to, we're trying to shoehorn in the old way into the new reality. And it just, it is, you can't, it doesn't fit. It's a round peg in a square hole or whatever you want to call it. And we just need to recognize that things are different for a moment and we've got to figure out how to get by with that. So anyway, I don't know if that's helpful, but hopefully it plants something in someone's mind that like, you know what, maybe we can slow down a bit and I can be a little bit more accommodating for people in the given reality we have. So. Cheers, Jason. So just to finish up, what are some, so obviously the book remote, that's gonna be bookending everything here. So everyone should check out that book. Is there anything, is there, for example, like a free trial of Basecamp that people could try on this downtime? Are there ways for people to try out Basecamp even if they're not right now spending a lot of money in their companies? Yeah, sure. Well, first off, thank you for mentioning this. Basecamp personal is an entirely free version. Let's you manage up to three projects and invite 20 or more people. It's plenty of space to mess around. That's at basecamp.com slash personal, entirely free. It's the same product, just a little bit limited, but you limited in terms of projects and people, but not limited in terms of functionality really. So you can really get a good feel for it. And the other thing is like, if you're an existing Basecamp customer, small business owner, and you're really truly having some struggles right now and some hardship, write us a note at support at basecamp.com, it'll give you a hand there. If you want a little bit extra time to try out Basecamp, the full fledged version, right now we have a 30-day free trial. If you need to double it, we can do that for you. Just write support at basecamp.com. We're trying to be as accommodating as possible for people, especially for people who watch this, but also anyone out there who just needs some help right now. The other thing is right now, at least in the US, I think in Canada too, remote, our book about remote working on Kindle and Apple eBooks is only $2.99. So publisher is extended a very special pricing opportunity for people. So it's basically free, three bucks. So that would be pretty helpful for people. And then David and I have been doing these live streams. So we've done two so far. We did one on, if you go to youtube.com slash basecamp, you'll be able to see those. We also have a channel on Twitch, I think that has those, but I'm not sure if those are still recorded after the fact. Anyway, we've been doing these two hour live streams where we're talking about remote work. Yesterday we did a full, complete walkthrough of basecamp, our own very own basecamp account, put up on the screen for about two hours and walk people through like how we use basecamp to run basecamp. So that's something that might be worth watching as well if you're curious about how that whole thing works. Yeah, and if you're watching this video right now on LinkedIn, just scroll down our page and you can see we've already posted that either yesterday or the day before so you can just jump straight to it. So Jason, really appreciate your time. Thanks for jumping on. And I hope you'll maybe seven weeks from now we might get to the end of the story of me bumping into you in a cafe in Chicago and people will let you know once they hear the ending for very, very, very exciting story. It's almost like the adventure. Well, hopefully seven weeks from now we'll be behind the, this will all be mostly behind us but who knows, right? Could last a lot longer, we'll have to see. But yeah, I want everyone to stay safe, be smart, take it easy, be fair to people right now, be kind, be useful, those sorts of things. And thanks for having me on, good to see you, good to talk to you. Hey, Jonathan here again. Really hope you liked that video. Please subscribe to our channel. We're really trying to grow it and hit the bell down below if you want to be notified when a new AJ and Smart video comes out. We love making videos for you but we really want to grow this channel and let us know in the comments what else we should ask Jason next time we have him on a call. Thank you, bye.