 Hey check check Can everyone hey? Put your hands up in the air put your hands up in the air That's the spirit. Okay So, hey everyone. I'm really glad to be here and it's a great pleasure for me to be here on The stage of work camp Europe. I'm really grateful to any and every one of you who's here at this room I know that we didn't quite get far too many seats here So I know that some people are waiting outside. So really, you know, the first team first out strategy works out pretty great here all developers are pretty You know satisfied that the algorithms that they studied at high school actually work. So so far so good I'm also really excited to talk about managing remote WordPress team or what I've been doing for the past probably nine years even before I started Debrex and And If you haven't attended the talks before mine here at this room the one for email management the one for business strategy and product business And the one for project management afterwards, please don't WordPress TV after their life and take a look at them They're really well combined in the whole, you know business topic track That's entailing the entire strategy for building and running a business building a business model and everything like that I'm going to touch on some of those today But you know my main focus would be managing a remote WordPress team few words about me I'm the CEO the founding dude and the WordPress architect at Debrex, which is a distributed agency I used to do a lot of coding before I'm Java certified have a lot of other useless certificates for security and for marketing and whatnot I'm the main guy who's dealing with Software as a service solutions and migrations in our team because that's kind of our main specialty At some point of time I had to get into marketing and project management I know that some of you guys have started with that and kind of entered the WordPress industry I was the code geek dealing with telecoms and banks and large enterprise Pleasant things at work before I actually had to enter into that industry I'm no fear ink with underscores in between on Twitter. So if you want to eat some crazy stuff I talk about feel free My boss wouldn't mind it. He's busy giving a talk right now And I'm really passionate about open source and working from coffee shops Not like the Dutch ones, but you know like the ones with Starbucks and cost and stuff like that About our team what we do mostly is we do retainers ongoing work, you know, it's recurring revenue We get money month by month, which is pretty awesome. It makes it more predictable Which is one of the main benefits of our business plans We do a lot of software as a service work and migrations bottom development API integrations We've worked with clients from the automotive airline industries and whatnot. It's pretty few banks and telecoms and whatnot We have three WordPress core contributors on the team. I'm pretty happy about that and six, you know community contributors WordPress TV moderators team reviewers and other folks who are pretty Embedded and involved in the WordPress community for those of you who don't know all those batches over there from folks on our team So anyway, I'd like to start with something Blinking it isn't blinking here Can it stop blinking? Yeah. No. Anyway, that's probably a disco effect over there Let me try one more time So anyway, it's remote for you. I'm going to I'm going to give you a short story Obviously remote is not a sustainable business model for some of those industries and that blinking is not a heartbeat or at least I hope so So it's obviously not sustainable for any of those industries out there And I'm pretty sure that you don't really want to get a doctor who's doing a heart surgery remote but In fact, what I actually learned on my way back from work camp Boston. I think last year I met a guy The guy's name was guy Who was actually working in a who's actually working in one of those laboratories and he was giving a training on Performing remote surgeries, you know and actually turned out that it's quite possible to use very specific fine-tuned 3d cameras only for the medical industry that they actually provide provide the opportunity for doctors to Operate remotely so that you know if they're very important and sensitive Operations in different on different continents in different countries They can just sit down in one of those laboratories and spend an hour for each operation without having to spend several days traveling back and forth So it's it's something very innovative. I would have used some photos, but they're very explicit so that's why I kind of skipped on that but it's actually working and You know the the the short version the gist of it is that if someone can perform a heart surgery remotely You have zero excuse not to do a hundred percent online business as a distributed business like zero That that's the gist of it, you know But anyway, so if you have decided to refew started like taco already asked how many of your business owners I know that some of you run small agencies or large agencies or big companies Like on site or remotely if you have decided to do a remote business There are several things that are managerial that are a bit more important than if you run an offline business But the short version is that you need to adhere to several different rules. There's some async. I see something. Okay, cool So there's the the business plan that you need to figure out very it's very important because you know having a formal business plan It's more important with a remote theme because you can't discuss all the fun stuff at the office or you know While having a drinks after business hours a lot of remote people don't really understand what you're after what your targets are and How you envision the steps to get there, you know, that's kind of the difference between having some folks at the office They know, you know, how you What to do on a daily basis they know What you're busy with how you spend your time, what are your main goals? You can have all those water cooler cheat chats here and there But it's something that remote workers don't really get and that's why you need to spend more time actually focusing on your business plan and business strategy in order to To allow for remote people to join your company if they're not there or to ensure the satisfaction of the current people working there So if we have to to nail this down in a certain way That's fun We we can identify several different vectors that we need to focus on so first off We need to identify the business direction, which is basically that plan that we're talking about Matt had a talk about, you know, building a product business and business plans So he covered that in details and then again, if you haven't seen the talk, please watch and work as TV later on Then you need to identify the key roles like when you have the business plan whether you're like a service agency a product business whether you're going to provide, you know migrations or Small business websites, whether you're taking a vertical everything needs to be written down Everything needs to be planned for the next six months for the next 18 months for the next three years So that you have a pretty pretty valid strategy as to what is any of you going to do For the time being So having said that you need to remember that slide because they're bringing so fast. It's probably the 25th, you know thing happening in TV so you need to identify those key roles and Identify the people who are going to work on that accordingly and what are the key positions that you want to hire for Because that's also something that's fairly important. You need to know what kind of positions you need to hire and whatnot then When you know what you need to hire for example, whether it's a php developer or a JavaScript developer or a marketing assistant or a marketing guy Whatever, you know what kind of skills they have to have in order to work for your company But what you don't know is what are the remote qualities of that particular person that we're going to cover Then we need to do the interviewing in the hiring can get into some issues that you may get in that process how to Ensure the employee retention or how to make sure that folks are staying with your company for as long as possible Then we have the growing thing. That's somewhere here. Come on show here There we go the growing thing working with tools and doing the agile model that at least our company is focusing on so the the main thing about the business idea is Related to the values and mission can anyone behind make sure that this isn't happening because it doesn't seem like something that's happening here But either way like once we identify the business goals and whatnot We need to make sure that everyone agrees with the business targets with the company goals and the values or what I'm saying Is that the most important thing like? Technical skills or whatever skills people use on a daily basis as something they've studied at the University Are usually the least important thing at work The most important things is that is that everyone is adhering to the company goals and values or in other words that everyone Is focusing on the same strategy everyone knows what's important for the company when something happens Everyone knows what to focus on like we are going to ignore all those minor details So that we can focus on the major on the most important thing on the main goal that the company is focusing on That's also important for interviewing later on When you're talking about leadership, it's super important That they represent you best why because at some point when you're getting to 30 40 50 60 80 people You are going to have to find folks that support 100% your methods, right? Because you won't be able to talk with every single person in your company at every single point of time and you may Miss important folks in your business and also poisonous people can very easily kill your business So make sure that you don't hire them don't get them involved in a single environment where they can harm your business like your clients or You know insult other people in your team and whatnot When you're building a team member profile like I said the qualities of a remote person are a bit different than the ones of You know person on on site Your remote employees should be accountable Which we're going to see in a moment Other than that they should be a team player unless they're working on something. That's really unique I'm going to change that again They need to be self-driven and motivated like motivation is one of the key things that are missing for non Remote people like if you can hang out with people and play football or something else at the office or having beers Remote people often don't know that and they feel like Isolated away from the office or away from the you know core leadership or whatnot. So they have they need to be more motivated Also, the remote person should learn fast and know how to find solutions to problems because you can just sit behind their back And so yeah, you can Google this and you can do this and move that and move this and move that So that's again an important quality for them They need to take ownership of a product or a problem not being taskers But actually understand the again the key vision the king goes goes for a business in order to be able to implement them as They're the decision makers of that particular thing, which means that you need to give them freedom They need to wear multiple hats because it's really important to be you know switching between different environments here and there And like I said a bit earlier Skills are often not the most important part You know communication team spirit being motivated being able to take responsibility being accountable are far more important for Remote person and skills can be taught at work. Trust me Wait Foster from Zapier a famous service a service that allows for integrating different APIs here and there Wrote in 21 month in how to major remote team a few specific tips that I'd also like to share with you What he says is hard doers, you know, not people just slacking and waiting for the end of the business day But doers hard people you can trust Especially with remote people that's really important Trust the people you hire obviously Hard people who can write because when you work remotely A lot of the work is actually happening within a project management systems or other tools that require a lot of writing For example, we have a minimum Words per minute speed that we accept just because sometimes it takes like five minutes to write a sentence Which is simply not acceptable when you work remotely And hard people who are okay without the social workplace There are some extra work people who think that they can work from home and they just can't and they kind of break down Unless they join a co-working space or a shared office or something like that So all those things are really important again. It's not about skills. It's about interpersonal skills. It's about social skills It's about not the technical or whatever professional skills. You would be looking for in the first place There is a specific model that was supplied. I think in Best Buy in the States. It's called ROWE Results only work in environments So the results only work in environment differs by telework with two different criteria People can, you know, leave or join Go online at the office or whatever at any time as they see fit Unlike requiring a permission to take a day off or working from home or whatever But the most important part is that with the result only working environment model Efficiency is the thing that's being rewarded and not the face time So one of the best strategies for a remote business model or something that I would strongly advise you do whenever possible is to focus on efficiency and the results instead of face time You know, when you have several people working on a similar complexity of tasks See who's doing the best and give them some freedom. Tell them that they can Embrace their creativity. They can, you know, focus on their energy And as long as they're hitting their results and they're happy they can get some free time off They can, you know, start later or whatever. So again, it's not about face time. It's not about specific business hours It's all about efficiency. Of course, there's certain exceptions You know, if you're doing support or if you're doing, I don't know, client calls or something like that Then you need to be around at certain times But other than that, there is a specific type of work that needs to be done And if you allow developers, designers, marketing people, each one of them is a creative person, you know Even development is a very creative skill and it requires a certain attitude It requires a certain, you know, amount of sleep a certain motivation so that people can do their work At their best level. So Efficiency award is one of the things that really strongly suggest you to do and also read about the results only working environment So regarding hiring can job interviews and whatnot The job description should be detailed and descriptive and focus again on those interpersonal skills or Skills that are important for a remote worker like communication responsibility logical thinking and whatnot You can do trial projects and trial milestones. It's a bit safer than having someone at the office The guys at modern tribe actually suggest Hire slow If I'm not mistaken, I think that Shane said that I'd say hire fast for trial projects and fire fast You know, give everyone a chance make sure that you have trial projects that are safe enough, you know Not sharing customer data accounts or whatnot just working on internal projects from products or something else Give everyone a chance and measure communication Responsibility Self-driven management and things like that because sometimes people are doers. They're motivated. They're, you know High performance as Chris Lennon says and those are the kind of people you want to work with even though They don't look awesome on the portfolio set expectations and measure everything like everything needs to be measured, especially with remote people You know productivity Cold quality Like everything that you can measure if it's for technical people for marketing people sales people, whatever Derek's we only are 2% of the people They're just they're just too many people who really don't fit that remote working model and they're just not a good fit For a remote person, even if they're perfect for staying at the office So once you have all that you need to put your team to work What what you can do is embrace the agile model and do a monday kickoff meeting so that everyone on the team can start You can do them online For example, we use asana for building the sprints and we use hipchat for communication And we make sure that if someone is in a time zone that's really Impossible to attend the meeting everything has a written log And everyone has a weekly sprint of tasks to work on and you know, basically everything has been prepared up front That's why we do the weekly sprints We do the weekly reviews at the end of the week just to make sure that there are no delayed tasks You know the project management has doesn't have to contact the client for certain delays or whatnot We keep track on each one's progress because because we work as a team and sometimes we have interdependencies It's easy to direct and navigate in daily stand-ups If you use for example Hipchat and pretty sure that slack has that you can just leave a stand-up message at the beginning of the day without having to schedule a specific time For everyone to meet at the same time and also we can track availability and report Immediately to clients just because everything is written in our project management system We have the sprint it's easy to export all the tasks see what's done. What's not and when like like we said We can track everything tools are super paramount So use all the tools and services that you can We use those are some of the things that we use some kind of on a daily basis For different kind of scenarios. We try to automate as many things as possible And this makes the life pretty easier so that we have less things To think about on a daily basis all sorts of automation build scripts standardization If you're doing migrations if you're doing automated testing if you're doing I don't know what time monitoring if you're doing backups There are tons of tools that can help you do deal with that you can use you know get help obviously for version control For your code you can do you know travis or continuous integration You can do everything that you do on a daily basis everything that you do more than two times or three times You can automate with that kind of tools What we do like again, you can do that with slack we do that with hipchat We flow everything into hipchat commits tasks and whatnot and then having all of our tasks on the sauna Everything being built as a task by task by sprints allocated to all people We can get the work estimates we can convert them to reports We can make reviews of those reports in order to make sure who's dealing fine Who's being slow for some reason and communicate with them accordingly with different project management strategies and generating voices for our clients according About bonding and scaling regarding the growing. I really thought that I can build a horizontal You know working environment at some point of time it turned out that it's impossible at least for me I find it really hard and that's why it's easier to work with smaller teams that work on projects because Especially as you grow distributed and higher all across the world in different continents You need to adhere to time zones. You need to make sure that communication is streamlined The fewer people work on a project these are communication is so this requires some sort of hierarchy And the vertical one is a bit easier especially when you can involve people who specialize in personal skills like project managers Or business operator assistants and other people who can actually work with your team for employer attention. We do on site you know Beer drinking and hook a smoke in a staco set We use hip chat and we have off-topic and chill chat channels where we share stuff like that You know just just enjoying and sharing the fun stuff that we saw at work with all of our remote team members We try to you know follow social media accounts and things like that just to share different Wins that they had like if they won a tournament or if they graduated for the university and things like that And share it with the whole team so that we can feel like a team working at the same office And something that I personally do is I'm listing the top three life priorities of everyone So that for each one of my team members I know what are their top three life priorities and that's what I'm trying to accomplish for each one of them So even if there's something you know over time or something else happening at work I know the top three priorities making sure that they're satisfied so that they can handle some extra work whenever needed Anyway, that's an ongoing and repetitive journey. I'm a bit behind on schedule Dry and kiss all the time. I'm not sure what you're thinking about but I'm going to explain it Uh, it's don't repeat yourself and keep it simple You know dude All the time make it easier for new people by process sizing everything, you know, just building processes as Matt said earlier Make it predictable unless there's a point in when in trouble focus on growing your business Um, additionally read more about the interruption science, which is something that's coming up as a slide in a moment Interruption science is the science of how different interruptions at the office or even remotely affect your team members It's really an important study for disruptions. So try to make it as Easily as possible as planned as possible with as fewer Hey, what's going on happening on a daily basis as possible Communication the most important part try for Chris communication It improves the project management improves the planning Reduces surprises prevents drama delays and mistakes immediately like really communication is probably the most important thing You need to find for a remote person Strengthens the team spirits, you know with less internal office drama and complete transparency What I suggest is whoever is the founder or the like the main manager Everyone needs to have direct access to him or her like it just needs to happen so that if someone feels threatened or Suppressed by another major they can go to the decision the main decision making the company For learning and improving go to community events contribute to work press Take certain courses that can improve your skills and knowledge and you learn more about other industries Do code reviews and peer programming explore other fields Try to learn new things every week Even if it's not about your specific niche could be like a new function Could be like a new way to communicate with clients and other people Try new tools and always try to challenge the process at every single point of time So uh, someone who I believe everyone knows here even though the slide isn't visible So that's a quote from matt millowack. We focus on two things when hiring First we find the best people you can in the world and second let them do their work just get out of their way When you do remote working, you don't have to adhere to the same office space at the same time Find the best people hard and let them do their work. That's pretty much an advice that I would like to reshare through matt So that's pretty much everything for me. So thanks everyone Thank you